The Road to The Four Hour Workweek : Elimination (Pareto in Practise)
Boy this post has been a long time coming. Somewhat ironically, given the subject matter, the delay has been caused by a combination of a slightly insane workload, and a general inertia caused by the breadth of the subject matter.
Anyway, enough excuses, on with the post.
Several months ago, I applied “Pareto’s Principle”, from the principles of elimination, to both my personal and business life. This post details the results.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that I’m not a hoarder. For many years I’ve been in the habit of purging my life of unwanted (or unneeded) possessions. This was in large part due to my practise of moving house every 6 - 12 months, which resulted in my viewing possessions as “stuff that will need to be packed and transported” in the near future.
Even before I subjected my life to the unswerving scrutiny of Pareto’s Principle, friends commented that my lack of possession made my house look like I hadn’t moved in yet.
As such, I didn’t expect much in the way of dramatic results. I was very wrong.
The Personal Pareto
Here’s a summary of the personal possessions that I sold, donated to friends, donated to charity, and threw away (in that order) over the course of three weeks:
- Nearly 75% of my DVDs (40 out of 55).
- 82% of my X-box games (9 out of 11).
- 20% of my non-work books (7 out of 36). That doesn’t sound particularly dramatic until you consider that of the remaining 29 books, 13 are reference books, and the other 15 I haven’t read yet. I’ve now placed a moratorium on buying new books, until I’ve read (or given away) those currently lining my shelves (shelf).
- Two black bin bags full of clothes. I have no idea what percentage of my clothing this equates to, only that storage space is no longer an issue.
I’m yet to get rid of my CDs, but there are around 300 on death row. Disposing of them one-by-one simply isn’t practical, so I’m seeking out a second-hand music shop that fancies taking them off my hands in exchange for chunk of cash.
The Business Pareto
Business possessions were subjected to a similar level of spring cleaning. In reality this only really affected books, with the figures being nearly identical to those for personal literature; 20% got the chop, and the surviving 80% is half reference material, and half (at least partially) unread.
Finally, and perhaps most controversially for all you information junkies out there, I deleted all my RSS feeds. That’s right, every single one. No more “A List Apart”. No more Khoi Vinh. They all went.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, this has had a very positive impact on my work-related knowledge. Instead of consuming vast tracts of information and opinion, and cluttering my del.icio.us account with yet more bookmarks that I’ll never look at again, I now seek out information as and when I need it.
I waste less time reading about stuff that might come in useful “one day”, and remember more of what I read because it has a specific and immediate application.
Purger’s Remorse?
The primary consequence of all this spring cleaning (aside from a lot more space) was an extra £141.60 in my pocket. That’s what I got from selling various DVDs and books through Amazon (chosen for convenience), after fees and postage.
The real question is, do I miss my absent possessions? Not in the slightest.
I did find myself hunting for Zeldman’s “Designing with Web Standards” at one point, before realising that it was now lining the shelves of Oxfam. A few seconds of Googling later, and I had the information I needed, no harm done.
Conclusion
Do it, seriously.
Next time I’ll be talking about batching, including the joys of checking email and phone messages once per day, and resisting the terrible lure of Facebook.