bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

As I discussed in a prior post about the 80 / 20 Rule roughly speaking 20% of causes create 80% of consequences.

It was upon this (and other trends) the 12 Hour Startup idea came into fruition, the idea that in a condensed time frame you can stimulate these causes that in the long run will drive big consequences.

We all know the stories, those that stayed up all night to complete that essay that go them an A, doing a proposal last minute, no matter what happens we seem to always slide it in.

My thought is to encourage this more often, we are going to build this product by next week, I am going to finish that job by Monday as it’s been sitting around too long.

You should try it, put some pressure on yourself to complete more of the things that are important in condensed time frames.

You’ll be surprised at how often you nail it.

This is exactly how this blog came about, I spent April this year doing a road trip around the South Island of New Zealand writing blog posts, and i gave myself a 24 hour deadline to get the blog up and running with my first post.  Wham, Bam, Done. 

So what do you have in motion that you can condense and get it done?

(and then you can move onto the next mountain)

Not many rules I follow.

However 80/20 rules is one that I pay attention to.

The argument is 20% of causes lead to 80% of consequences.

(Note: its not strictly 80/20 it can be 90/10)

Examples are:

• 20% of streets cause 80% of traffic jams
• 20% of your clients derive 80% of your profits
• 20% of faults make up 80% of your replacement costs

Smart thinking.

I always throw this around every few months, see what else I’m doing wrong, or where improvements can be made.

Some examples i’ve found:

• 20% of our Marketing Exp lead to 80% of our revenue.
• 10% of my calls derive 90% of my mobile bill
• 20% of my clients derive roughly 85% of my revenue (fluctuates a little bit)
• 13% of our content drove 95% of our traffic

Once you’ve identified a link, what can you do to improve that 20%? How can you look after your clients that drive 80% of our profit? Can you modify your call behaviour to lower the 10% that make up 90% of your bill?

Give it a shot, it’s not only fun, it’s quite interesting to see the results.

Have you already done it? share your results I’m always intrigued…