Barnabas Notes

I’ve been thinking a lot the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 principle. Tim Ferris writes about this in The 4-Hour Workweek. Wikipedia summarizes it best, “80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.”

It is often applied to business situations where 80 percent of revenue comes from 20 percent of clients. This is one way Tim (if I can call him Tim) uses it in his book. We saw something like this at Silas.

I’m a big fan of this principle, and was first given a taste of it in college when my Public Choice economics professor told the class that it isn’t efficient to get a grade higher than a 92 percent. Anything more is still an “A” but takes a lot more work.

This principle is usually applied to a set of things, but I’m interested in applying it to a specific thing. For example, can we really get 80 percent of the results from a website by doing 20 percent of the work. Can a hundred page website be twenty pages? Can a five page website be one page? Could you spend 1/5 of the time looking at analytics, doing information architecture and creating designs and still see 80 percent of the results?

I’m going to break my discussion into three posts. This post defines the question. The second will look at the psychology of “done” and the third will look at the problem of selling 80 percent.