The 80/20 syndrome

I’ve come to find out that there are several iterations of this rule. Some people also refer to it as the 80/20 principle. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the rule that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. Another version says that 80% of your results come from 20% of you efforts and so on and so forth. But, did you also know that the 80/20 rule also applies to your desire to drive a project to completion?

I was talking with one of my co-workers and he was telling me that he’s about 80% done with this one big project he’s been working on for the last few months. He’s a programmer, and he was telling me about the milestones that he’s met along the way, the evolution of the project etc. He was telling me that most of the functionality, the back ends, etc. is all done. The project is at a point where users have started the period called UAT (User Acceptance Testing).

Now that the project is in UAT, and at 80% completion, he no longer wants to work on it. The end users are mostly happy with the program. The change requests have been limited to very minor things, most of them cosmetic which fall into the designer’s lap instead of the programmer’s lap. Even with that, he just can’t be bothered to finish out the remaining 20%.

That’s when he told me that he had “80/20 syndrome.” Now that only 20% of the project is left, he wants to move on to the next big thing, but can’t do so until he finishes this one. That last 20% is the hardest one.

This story reminds me of when I was training for my first marathon. A full blown marathon is 26.2 miles in length, which you cover in a “single sitting.” While we were preparing for the race, the coach told the group that the marathon was essentially a 20 mile run, followed by a 10k (6.2 miles). That’s roughly an 80/20 split. I felt a greater sense of relief after I passed that 20 mile mark than I did when I passed the 13.1 mile mark.

I think that I’m in the grips of 80/20 syndrome myself. I have a project that is about 80% complete, but getting to the motivation to push it over that last little hump and drive the project to completion is eluding me. I keep finding other, much more fun things that I would rather do.

When you’re running a marathon, to cover the last 20%, all you have to do is put one foot in front of the other and repeat. But, how do you overcome that last 20% in business?

Do you suffer from 80/20 syndrome? How do you overcome it?

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