The Pareto Principle and the Minimum Effective Dose

[Note: I shared this mental model with my email subscribers on Dec 11, 2016. If you want to receive a new mental model every week, join the club.]

 

Out of more than 120 wholesale customers, a mere 5 were bringing in 95% of the revenue. I was spending 98% of my time chasing the remainder. – Tim Ferriss, Four Hour Work Week

What it is:

Most of us are familiar with the Pareto Principle. 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients. 20% of people produce 80% of your enjoyment and propel you forward. But 20% produce 80% of your anger too.

A few factors have disproportionate influence.

Some of us are also familiar with Pareto’s more extreme cousin – the power law.

But fewer of us make the jump to its immediate corollary – the Minimum Effective Dose (MED). 

 

I first came across this in Tim Ferriss’ books. He defines it as “the smallest dose that will produce the desired outcome”.

The logic goes – if 20% of tasks produce 80% of the results, then you need to focus only on this 20%. In most avenues of life, where perfection is not the goal, this 20% is all you need to be effective.

This was one of the big ideas of 2015 for me. It transformed how I think. See more here.

Examples:

• MED in business: Whether your customers, your vendors, or your advertising – choose the few that give you the most value, and forget about the rest.

• MED in writing: Don’t use the passive voice. Use simple words and sentences. Scott Adams shows the way.

• MED in marketing: See Neil Patel’s guide to apply the 80/20 principle to your marketing. Or instead, just follow Andrew Chen’s guide – There’s only a few ways to scale user growth, and here’s the list.

• MED in daily productivity: What’s the no. 1 most important task of your day. Do that first. (“Minimum Viable Day”, anyone?).

• MED in health: Stop eating white carbs. See Tim Ferriss’ slow carb diet, or Gary Taubes’ Why we get fat. (But maybe I’m oversimplifying – I’m not a health expert).

[Tweet “If 20% of tasks produce 80% of the results, then you need to focus only on this 20%. #pareto #MED”]

Rules to follow:

1. Identify which tasks have the most impact on your objective.
2. Focus on them. Forget about the rest.

This suddenly reminded me of Warren Buffett’s Two List strategy.

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Further Reading:

• What I Learned from Reading 6,000+ Articles in the Last 52 Weeks: Where I attempted to arrive at an MED of whatever I’d learnt in 50 issues of the newsletter. Be warned – it’s a rabbit hole of rabbit holes.

 

Linked to: Power Law, Parkinson’s Law

Filed Under: Economics, Business & Investing, Productivity