I’m sure others have a similar rule, but this is my formulation. The 80/20 rule is a pretty decent formulation of it. Per Wikipedia:
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
I’d take it one step further. If there’s a solution that covers 85% of situations, I figure I can improvise the remaining 15% of the time. Case in point – there’s my swiss army pocket knife. I wanted a knife with features that would be useful to me 85% of the time. I chose one that had scissors, bottle opener, wire stripper, flathead screwdriver, a philips head screwdriver, a magnet, blade, and a few minor other features. I didn’t get the one with the pliers, corkscrew, saw, or other wacky features. Applying this rule, I chose a knife that fairly cheap, but had features I would use 85% of the time. 1
I applied this rule in creating ProfileMaker. 2 3 I wanted something that would help people in about 85% of the situations they would face. I also applied this rule when choosing my new laptop. I didn’t need a workhorse for playing games, video editing, or large number crunching, so I got an economical laptop with plenty of hard drive space and long battery life. Tonight I was asking my little laptop to crunch some big numbers – namely render a big OpenSCAD design composed of a number of smaller STL’s. Waiting for things to render, now that’s when I sometimes look back and wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off getting that last 15% worth of computing power. :)
- The Rambler, if you’re interested. [↩]
- And, really, in about 85% of all things I program… [↩]
- And, if you look at most of what I’ve written, I’d say about 85% of them are about 85% done. [↩]