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.