A Word With Pareto — David DuChemin

EPISODE 076: A Word With Pareto

19th-century economist Vilfredo Pareto was out in his garden when he noticed only 20% of his pea plants were producing 80% of the peas. Fast forward to today and the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule is familiar to many in the business world, but what's it got to do with you and your creative life, and is there something more for us in this idea than what is so often reduced to notions of productivity and profitability? Let's talk about it.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

When I get back from a trip, as I did this weekend after a week among polar bears and arctic foxes in Churchill, Manitoba, my to-do list swells and if I'm very lucky, I'll get a solid case of Jet Lag for the days that come in the wake of my return, giving me a few extra hours in the morning to chip away at it all. Editing photographs, printing the best of that work, cleaning gear and putting it away, buying replacements for anything that broke, and a million other details to fit in between the loads of laundry and replying to the pile of email that's build up in my absence.

Most of us have some level of constant daily stuff to contend with, tasks that always seem to renew themselves on the To-Do list or the calendar, it's like the moment we check them off the list and turn our backs, they just un-check themselves. There's a great scene in the 2004 Pixar movie The Incredibles, in which Mr. Incredible says, "No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to STAY SAVED, you know? For a little bit." It's like he's reading my mail. If these smaller details, the trivial little tasks that take up so much of my attention and time would just stay ticked on the endless list, maybe it wouldn't seem so , well, endless.

So that's the immediate context for this conversation. That and the last episode in which we discussed the need for time and space to do our best work. Because here's the problem: those little details I'm staring down right now are not my real work. They're pieces, little fragments, and without them my deeper work doesn't get done so it's not like I can just toss them aside. "Don't sweat the small stuff," they say. And yet they also say "God is in the details." So which is it? I might not be sweating the small stuff but if I don't attend to it at some point my deeper work won't even be possible, and I can't possibly be the only one who wrestles with this stuff, and lies awake at night thinking about how to juggle what often feels like too many balls. So what's this got to do with you and your own creative work? I'm David duChemin, and this is episode 076 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.

There is a principle among those who think about such things, called the Pareto Principle, it's named after the late-19th century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted that 80% of the peas in his garden came from only 20% of his plants. Later he published a book exploring the principle in economic terms, observing that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Broadly speaking this principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule, states that 20% of our efforts are responsible for 80% of our results. This means 80% of our time is spent doing things that just don't move the needle very much. The small stuff.

I've given a lot of thought to the Pareto Principle over the years. I first read about it in Tim Ferriss' book The Four-Hour Workweek, and was struck by what, at first, felt like a call to become much more efficient, to chip away at the wasteful 80% and get more directly to the good stuff. But, at least in terms of creative work, it seems to me that the 20% effort that results in the best of what I make, that's the deep work. It's the slow hot burn of work done with time and focus and I don't think I could go all-in on it for more than 20% of my time, even if I had the time to do so.

Furthermore, what if that remaining 80% of my time and daily efforts, far from necessarily being wasteful and in need of adjusting or trimming, what if that's just real life? The details and emails, the errands, research, planning, or whatever version of this kind of stuff your own work entails, what if this IS the space I was talking about in the last episode? What if the point of the Pareto Principle is to give ourselves both permission not to stress out when much of our time feels like we're not moving the needle on the big stuff, and the freedom to really focus on that stuff, totally undistracted when that 20% time comes around?

I wonder if Pareto is saying, at least in the context of our creative work, that what is important is not changing the ratio of work to results, not freaking out that the small stuff is taking the lion's share of the day, but being jealous about protecting the critical 20% and not letting it get diluted with our inattention when it's time to focus and do the deep work. This 80/20 rule, applied to the way I think about my own work reminds me to put the big important rocks in first, even if there are fewer of them, and when I look at my average work day, so long as I've been intentional about things, it almost always averages out to about 8 hours of tending to the small stuff, and only 2 hours doing the deep stuff and moving the needle. It's rare that I really have more bandwidth, either emotionally or mentally, to clock much more than that. If anything, perhaps Pareto is telling me that my desire for these big 80% margins is healthy.

The questions Pareto prompts me to ask are these: am I guarding the 20% and making it the priority over the 80? The small stuff needs to get done, but it doesn't move the needle. It's not legacy stuff. But the 20% is, and it's got to have its space, time, and focus. The remaining 80%, filled with trivialities and necessary but not very sexy work, or even sitting doing nothing, having a nap or reading a book - those are not the problem, it's when the 80% begins to displace the 20%, and when that all-important 20% gets diluted. That's when my work suffers.

Checking in with Pareto now and then, looking at what comprises my own particular 80/20 allows me to breathe a little more freely when things don't feel balanced, or when I feel like I'm doing way more small stuff than deep stuff. Pareto gives me permission not to seek what normally might look like balance, or if it is balance, it's the kind achieved when you weigh fewer things on one side but they're weightier and more important than the many smaller things on the other. When weighed, 20 gold coins might balance out against 80 coins made from copper, but the value on the one side wouldn't be remotely the same as on the other. I think balance in the creative life looks different than we sometimes expect, though in truth I don't think it lends itself well to be measured at all, with any metrics.

Pareto keeps me honest, too. I know I said this wasn't about efficiency, but I think it's fair to look at what we're doing every now and then, to peer into the 20%, the efforts Pareto suggests should be leading to 80% of our results, and ask if we couldn't maybe do more of the stuff that's creating the greatest gains, whether those gains are in productivity, financial rewards, or emotionally. If 20% of what I do accounts for 80% of my happiness, meaning, or satisfaction, perhaps it's time to shed some of that which isn't helping and pursue more of that which is. In some cases you might be able to abandon some of that 80% in order to focus on the 20. We get that kind of freedom when it's clear our work in one area just isn't accomplishing what we thought.

There's probably plenty of room for all of us to trim the fat and get closer and closer to doing more of what you love, creating stronger work in the time you have, or feeling less guilty about the hours in your day during which you and the muse are doing different things .

All of this feel pretty metaphorical to me. I don't think there's much in the creative life that's so tangible it can be cleanly parsed into tidy percentages, but perhaps, at least in our context, our friend Vilfredo is giving us the gift of perspective and permission. Or that's how I see it. Even now, staring down a massive to-do list, only 20% of it seems meaningful and I feel like a real creative person, a real artist, wouldn't get so beset by the small stuff. Pareto reminds me I'm not alone, and neither are you, in the daily effort, with the time we have, to make something beautiful.

Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0