Throughout my career I have always had the capability to either do things quicker than most people, or deliver more in the same period of. This is a skill that has helped me climb the corporate ladder quickly. It’s also a skill that one you can teach others you can explode your teams productivity.
The majority of people have heard principle, that 80% of the results are achieved with 20% of the effort. The challenge is that so few people leverage that to their benefit.
What I have found throughout my 30 year career is that more often than not 80% is good enough. It’s that last 20% that kills our productivity, or limits it. And more often than not these are just bells and whistles, or a level of quality this is in excess to what is needed. The majority of business systems I have delivered the client was happier to get 80% of functionality early, rather than wait until it was 100% complete.
One of my bosses, David Thornewill used to say Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and he was right. Once you get into the mindset of good enough, rather than perfect it is a game changer.
I created this chart to try and give a better explanation, ora visual explanation of what I mean to show the impact.
If you focus on delivering 100% that is going to take 100% of your available capacity during that team.
Whereas if you take the Pareto approach and focus on delivering 80% in 20% of the time. As long as this is the right 80% then your solutions, deliverable will be good enough.
It takes practise. But the more you do it the better you will become. With this approach you still have 80% of the time left to focus on something else. And if you keep repeating the process, then you could feasibly get to 400% output. Now in reality thats going to be hard to do, but you can easily double your productivity. Then if you can do that for your teams, then you can really unlock their full potential.
One approach to improving in this area is doing reviews and seeing where you and your teams felt they spent time that was wasted. Or understanding things that were delivered that weren’t needed.
Once you start to understand and eliminate these things you will have a developed your Pareto mindset. Not only do it allow you to achieve more, but it helps to simplify things. Your teams will more more motivated as they will be more productive. There’s the saying happy people are productive people. But it’s also true that productive people are happy people too.
If you’d like to get some help in developing your Pareto mindset, then please click the link to reach out and lets talk about how i can help
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