Pareto’s Law- A primer on smart work

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the “vital few”).[1] Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity. - Wiki

I only recently came across this principle a few months back while doing Ali Abdaal's wonderful Skillshare course. It has made me reconsider all of the decision making that goes onto my projects and actions in life.

it might be the case that 80 percent of a business’s profits come from just 20 percent of its clients, 80 percent of a nation’s wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens, or 80 percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs. - Cal Newport (Deep Work)

From the lens of time management and prioritizing, this law is especially useful when one considers that 80% of your output is basically a result of 20% of your actions. Thus also effectively stating that anything you put beyond the 20% is going to give you radically reduced diminishing returns.

The catch is to define the 20% effectively, spend a reasonable amount of time in defining which are the tasks that need your attention the most out of all the things that you do in a day.

Newport in his book also goes as far as to encourage that one should eliminate the 80% tasks that give you reduced returns as the brain doesn't distinguish between a high priority task and a low one, and that the overhead on your mental energy is the same as long as you don't stop entirely doing the tasks that don't align to your desired outcomes.

all activities, regardless of their importance, consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit.- Cal Newport

Ice age, dirty rooms and compounding

If something compounds—if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth—a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic. It can be so logic-defying that you underestimate what’s possible, where growth comes from, and what it can lead to. - Morgan Housel

It was surprising to me when I read the cause of Ice ages in Morgan Housel’s amazing book The Psychology of Money. After decades of assumptions scientists basically came down to this conclusion:

“It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.”

As year after year the sun became moderately cooler, summers became slightly less warmer, the ice sheets persisted and compounded every winter year after year after year until they became so strong that the strongest of summers took thousands of years to melt it down.

Morgan uses this as a brilliant analogy to understand compounding in money. James Clear in his book Atomic Habits (which is a must read for every soul IMO) talks at length about how small habits can compound into life-defining changes that might seem unheard of at the start. And of course bad habits compound too.

The room I didn’t clean gathered some dust over the last three days and the very nature of dust is such that it attracts more dust quicker compared to that of a clean tile surface. The next three days it will exponentially cause more dust to accumulate as dust itself is a dust magnet. Imagine the effort I will have to waste to clean them at the end of the week rather than now.

There is a lot of truth in showing up to work, motivation be damned. As James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits

If you start with $100, then a 50 percent gain will take you to $150. But you only need a 33 percent loss to take you back to $100. In other words, avoiding a 33 percent loss is just as valuable as achieving a 50 percent gain.

We generally don’t think of compounding in this way. Its a concept not just for money in stocks or loans but also in the lesser tangible aspects of life. If you wanna get better at anything, be regular through thick and thin and let compounding show its magic.

The Blue Hour

Just before dawn, there’s a minute of silence. The day birds aren’t up yet and the night birds are already asleep. And then…..there’s real silence. -Reinette (From the film)

Started watching this beautiful film yesterday by Eric Rohmer. The Blue Hour is part 1 of the film and being an early riser I could relate a lot to this. Reinette stresses heavily in the film that the minute is something to be experienced and no one can just know the blue hour without feeling it and being in the moment.

It also reminds me to get back on my schedule to wake earlier than am doing now.