The 20% you want is not the 80% you need
On bad time management with great intention
Having a creative streak in a technical job can be both a blessing and a curse. As a programmer, most of the time I’ve become accustomed to building great things that other people design, something most of us have become accustomed to in the industry it seems, however, the true curse is having an obsession with detail.
Working for the usual-but-totally-more-than-usual number of hours in a day, I often find myself coming home faced with a familiar conundrum: should I work on some of the ideas I have now? follow my passion? or close that #%@$! laptop and read a book.
Some of the time do close my laptop, most of the time I don’t, yet when I do choose to amuse myself by attempting to cross off an item from my ever-growing list of seemingly brilliant ideas, I seem to guarantee my own failure by starting on the wrong end.
You see, to me (and others) the little details are what make any product great, the polish, the feel, the finesse, the small heart at the bottom of a blog post, so why not start at the heart of great and let the rest fall into place, I mean after all, all the other boring stuff is mostly a filler for this part, right?
I remember once reading about the Pareto principle:
For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. — Pareto Principle
My idea was that if 20% of the effects make up 80% of the work, then 80% of the success of a project lies in that 20%: the smaller (and seemingly more crucial) details.
The issue with this noble approach, however, is that 20% of nothing is still nothing (trust me on this, I did the math) — I can’t even count how many nights I ended up defeated thinking: “I’ve just wasted the last four hours trying to pick a colour scheme for a website that doesn’t even exist yet” before storming off to bed in a childish rage swearing that I’d be better next time.
The problem required me to adapt my understanding of the principle.
The 20% you want is not the 80% you need.
Most of us eventually get 100% of the way purely by allowing ourselves to start and finish the first 80% at 20% of the time cost. This is not to say that the last 20% isn’t just as important, but rather that it should be digested as a dessert that can only be enjoyed after chewing through the broccoli of the first 80% of the project - Transitions, colour schemes and polish are great and important aspects of creating a successful product, but they’d look even more nifty on a product that actually existed.
Do not to let the nitpicking consume you until it is all you have left.
The secret I’ve discovered is not to let the nitpicking consume you until it is all you have left, this way, having worked through the first 80%, you now have some resemblance of a product, allowing you to sweat the smaller stuff while deciding if you even like broccoli in the first place.
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