Thanks Andy. You’re right, that is one way to think about it. I was thinking about it from this perspective: it’s OK to get *most* of the output but not *all* in a lot of cases, but there are some situations where the Pareto principle shouldn’t be applied to the entire task.

I’m sure it’s applicable in many parts of the car or thesis process (research, planning, etc) but to try to use it as a framework for the whole task just means you end up with an incomplete product.

A better example might be the process for Book in a Box. It’s great that we got the process to 80% or so in the first month or so of working on it, but it’s clearly so important to the core of our business that we absolutely need to spend the grueling amounts of time it takes to get that 80% to 99.999% – that’s where we’re delivering most of our value to our clients.

But with the car, or the thesis, it’s actually the LAST 20% that produces most of the results — going from almost finished to complete product is MUCH more valuable than only going 80% of the way there.