The 80-20 to declutter just about everything in life.

There was just wayy too much stuff on my desktop earlier this week. Too many shortcuts to programs I've never used, too many docs I've never touched. I wanted to simplify this, but everything just looked terribly important - it was difficult to see where to begin.

I figured that the 80-20 rule(which I so gush about in my work, conversations and elsewhere) would be a good approach to handle this. Put simply, the 80-20 rule says that 80% of your outputs are because of 20% of your inputs. So 20% of a population have 80% of the wealth, you finish 80% of all work in 20% of the time, and so on and so forth.

How does that apply to simplifying and decluttering? Well, the 80-20 rule tells me that I frequently use only 20% of what is present on my desktop. Once I recognized that, I resolved to ruthlessly eliminate everything else(yes, that ruthlessness is important - if you keep hemming-and-hawing about keeping a shortcut to minesweeper which you use 1% of the time, you're going to miss the point).

A couple of minutes, and the desktop looks clean, free, open.

Of course, that same approach works pretty much elsewhere too. My workdesk had too much on it - books, business cards, CDs - it's now simple and prioritized. The music folders on my comp had just too much in them - now they just have the stuff I listen to often. If clutter is getting to you and short of time, you can just work on eliminating the 80% of the less important stuff.

*Eliminate isnt always 'shift-delete'. For instance, while organizing my music I just put the stuff less often listened to under 'Others'. This limits the number of categories and choices I have, and makes everything more manageable.

**As you've guessed, the 80-20 isnt a 'rule' set in stone. It could be 90-10, or 70-30. The point is that there will be diminishing returns to scale, and that's very useful while decluttering life.

Making choice easy....

Often on the web, you get told what products you might like. On many sites you get told what the top 10 in your genre are(I’ve discovered some very cool stuff on internet radio stations like Last.fm ). These recommendations work well because:

a. You can serendipitously discover new stuff you hadn’t heard of.

b. The merchant can sell more stuff(often obscure stuff that you wouldn’t have known otherwise).

One reason this works so well is that we all love to be surprised. We all love to discover and stumble upon stuff.

What would be cool is if this experience were replicated in offline markets. Often, customers don’t quite know what they want. It is possible to create experiences that help people make decisions, even if you don’t quite have the precision of an algorithm-generated recommendation.

Imagine if your waiter gave you suggestions for new dishes (my favourite restaurant does this – I suspect they’re not alone). Or if you had clothing shops or supermarkets that had a board listing out the top 10 products from yesterday.

Most marketers approach this indirectly – they mark bestsellers at a discount, or advertise them more heavily. It’s not often that people have tried out telling customers up front – “these are the top 10 products – you should consider buying one of them”.

Being simple and direct is an easy way to prompt a customer to make an impulse purchase. If it’s worked so well online, it should work offline too. This is something I’d love to see being tried out.

On how to ruin an ad by breaking promises.

So I saw this ad on Gmail this morning. It promised much, and had a bit of a mystery around it.

Now, I’m not looking for advertising services. Still, since that line is intriguing, I figured that I could take a look at what exactly they offer that isnt advertising as I know it. So I clicked.

What do I get? A blank screen. A flash screen that takes 45 seconds to load. Still, that tagline is promising. Maybe these guys are good. Good things come to those who wait, eh?

When it finally did load, this is what I get:

Mhmm. Lots of questions here that the website refuses to answer.
a. If I do want to advertise, what can they do for me?
b. And precisely what is the extraordinary advertising work that they promise in the tagline over there?
c. What exactly are all these images and icons? I mean, they’re randomly pretty, but do they mean anything?
d. How is any of that going to help me make money? Or advertise?
e. Why should I care?

It’s a pity, really, that they’ve ruined all the anticipation built by that tagline by having a fancy-but-pointless website.

Of course, after some navigation I find that it’s a local agency based in London. So, what were they doing showing an ad to folks in India? What were they smoking? Not only is this unproductive for them, but it’s such a waste of *my* time, when I realize they’re in London and I cant deal with them anyway.

If they get their targeting totally wrong, they talk to all the wrong prospects when they pitch their own business, why should any client trust them with his business, anyway?

Guarding against negative Black Swans

Black Swans, as you’ll know if you’ve read the book, are high impact low probability events that we don’t really foresee because, well, they’re low probability events, right?

But then, it isn’t *that* difficult to spot some of these Black Swans in daily life. And just as important, to do something about them. Within a day after reading the book, I noticed quite a few areas that I could make Black Swan proof:

Automobile crashes: Wear a helmet/seat belt. Sure, the odds of crashing are small, but when you do the odds are it’ll be dangerous.
ATM machine failures: Don’t wait till the morning of a journey to draw money. Once, an ATM swallowed up my card with painful consequences. Now, by going to an ATM the day before traveling, I can always borrow from a friend in the event of the ATM going bonk.
Pickpockets: Keep your credit cards in different pockets. Keep money in 3 different places on you – some in a bag, some in wallet, some in a shirt. Also, take cheques along on journeys.

If you notice, in each of the above, the cost of protection is very small compared to the loss itself. Therefore the behavior change required to guard against these events is relatively easy, provided you’re aware of the need to take steps.

Chase the new or grow the old?

Ship fast, ship often, they say. The one downside of that is a lack of focus. If you ship a lot of products, you’re likely to be caught up in the excitement of the new product. The existing product that needs your focus wont get the attention it deserves, and will suffer.

What should you do? Separate your new ventures and existing businesses. They need different kinds of people to run. Hunters and farmers. Studs and fighters.

Existing and new businesses are different cups of tea. It makes sense to manage them separately.

The one reason Buzz might just click....

…is that it’s within Gmail. You need Gmail. You keep checking it every few minutes you’re online. Google’s bet is that your attention-deficit-disordered mind will want to click on that ‘Buzz’ link.

Remember Wave? You had to go over to wave.google.com . In hindsight, what killed Wave was that it was at a different URL. Its ‘incompatibility’ with something users were familiar with was too much of a barrier.

Anything new faces a lot of friction and inertia. If someone told you to go deep sea diving, you wouldn’t take the plunge right away. You’d hem and haw and ask around and inquire. You’d make sure your fears are allayed before you take a step.

One way to overcome that friction is to build a bridge from the old to the new, and make that bridge easy to traverse. That’s something Goog seems to have done astutely with Buzz.

(and what is the one thing that might kill Buzz? The fact that it hasnt really thought about privacy. And has refused to learn from Facebook's mistakes.)

On common men, and laziness in word choice

The Hindu reports that the media was exhorted to ‘fight for the common man’.

Okay. So common man who? Chap making under 3k a month? Slum dweller? Footpath dweller? Rickshaw driver? What about me? Am I a common man?

Which of those would you want the media to ‘fight for’? The one man with the lowest income of the lot? All of the people below a certain income level? Everybody on earth?

I have a problem with lazy statements like that. Even if the statement is sincere, you cant ‘fight for’ everyone, unless you have infinite time, energy and media space. And what’s worse, if you attempt ‘fighting for’ everyone, you end up making a difference to no one.

The reason why people say pointless things, perhaps, is that they have nothing to say.

On measuring simplicity

Simplicity in writing is elusive. We all talk about it. But the only way to judge it was 'I know it when I see it'.

I was glad to find, then, a way of quantifying simple writing. Of objectively knowing how readable a piece is. This involves using any of the different readability measures. Readability measures help evaluate how simple and easy-to-read a piece is. These consider variables like letters per word and length of sentence to evaluate readability.

http://www.addedbytes.com/code/readability-score/

It is useful to pick any one of the measures and follow it consistently. I like the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, since it is easy to interpret. It roughly gives the number of years of schooling it
would take someone to understand the content.

The lower the score, the simpler the piece is. Typically, a score above 12 indicates fairly convoluted writing. Some of the best long form copywriters I know manage consistent scores of under 6.

This is a good way to objectively measure how simple/crisp your writing is.

PS - Thanks for this tip to John Fancher, whose copywriting I've been very impressed by.

When free isnt really free

When I bought some t-shirts yesterday, I turned down the offer of the wrapping and plastic covers. These were free, but they were also unnecessary. I might even say they imposed on me the cost of cleaning up their clutter at home.

Just because something’s free, it’s not necessarily a nice thing. For one, nothing is truly free. Consuming a ‘free’ good has an opportunity cost to it. You might even get more utility by paying for something compared to consuming something else for free. Government hospitals are free, but they’re so bad you and me don’t seek treatment there.

See the parallels with the world wide web? The marginal cost of producing another web page is close to zero. Everything on the web is free. It’s no longer an economy of scarcity, it’s one of abundance. It’s easy to show up, anyone can do that.

Being there is no longer enough to make people want to engage with you, deal with you. On the world wide web, you've got to give more compelling reasons to stay with you.