I think 80/20 is useful (to an extent) in thinking about how to spend your time not so much as formal model and not as an excuse to ignore details, cut corners,

I think 80/20 is useful (to an extent) in thinking about how to spend your time not so much as formal model and not as an excuse to ignore details, cut corners, or avoid tasks that need to be done. Used informally it’s a way of avoiding busy work and focusing your limited time and resources on the most important tasks, hang out more with the 20% (maybe it’s 10% or 70%) of friends that have the most fun with, and so on. There are a lot of people who get trapped in the roughly 80% of effort that leads to the 20% of benefit, spinning their wheels, doing tasks that have little benefit. We’ve all wasted time unecessarily There are many ways to think about this general idea of focusing on what’s important. Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People talks about four quadrants: 1.urgent and important 2. Urgent but not important 3. Important but not urgent (he notes that it’s common to neglect this quadrant) 4. Not important and not urgent. Ideally, we’d spend most of our effort, maybe it’s 80%, on 1 and 3. A trite and possibly gag worthy way of way of saying it is, “work smart, not hard,” which I’d amend to try to work smart and hard. Anyway, it’s useful to take a look at these ideas but not as an excuse to do shoddy work.