Hey everyone, welcome to the ArcSmarter Podcast. I'm Michael Kilkelly. And today we're talking about a principle that completely changed how I approach my work and how I can be a lot more productive. Before we dive into that, let me tell you a story from my early days as an architect. I was fresh out of architecture school and I was working on my first Real project.
And this is my first design responsibility. So it's one week before our design development deadline. And my project manager asked me to come up with a list of all the remaining design issues. So I handed her my list of 10 items and I said, here are the 10 items I have left. It was really hard to prioritize them.
They're all important. And I can still see her raised eyebrow as she looked at my list, but 20, 30 years later. So you're telling me, she said. that designing custom code hooks is as important as fine tuning the proportions of the building massing? Well, I mean, no. Not when you put it that way, I responded.
And, she went on, do you really think the restroom tile pattern will bring as much to the project as finishing the entrance of the lobby? So, before I could dig myself into a deeper hole, she held up her hand and she said something I'll never forget. She said, We have one week left. I want you to pick out the two items on this list that will bring the most impact to the project.
And then I want you to work on only those two items. Nothing else matters. So needless to say, we got out the DD set. And that project didn't win any design awards. But the client was happy with the result. And we got hired again for another project. This was my first introduction to the Pareto principle.
Or as it's commonly called, The 80 20 rule. So what is the Pareto principle? Well, it's simple. It states that 80 percent of your results come from only 20 percent of your efforts. And it shows up everywhere in our industry, from design to project management, to client relationships. Think about your current workload.
I'm willing to bet that 80 percent of your stress and frustration comes from 20 percent of your projects. Am I right? Now, the principle has a fascinating history. It was first discovered in 1896 by an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed something interesting about wealth distribution in Italy.
Being curious, he started looking at other countries and found similar patterns everywhere he looked. Then he turned his attention to his garden. And in that eureka moment, Pareto noticed the same pattern. 80 percent of his peas came from only 20 percent of his pea pods. Seriously. But the real practical application of the principle came in the 1940s when a quality management guru named Joseph Duran rediscovered Pareto's work.
Durand was working at Western Electric trying to solve quality control problems in their manufacturing process. He noticed that most of their defects came from a small number of causes. So on a hunch, he dug into Pareto's research and had this aha moment. The Pareto Principle wasn't just about economics or peapods, this was a universal principle that could be applied to almost anything.
Duran called it the Vital Few and the Trivial Many Principle, though most people know it as the 80 20 rule today. He started applying it to business problems. And it revolutionized quality control and manufacturing. So think about that. An observation about land ownership in 19th century Italy ended up transforming how we think about quality control in modern manufacturing, as well as how we think about productivity in virtually any industry at all.
Now, In the 1950s and 60s, Japanese manufacturers like Toyota started using these principles to develop their production systems. And they realized that by focusing on the vital few causes of defects, they could dramatically improve quality while actually reducing costs. Now, before we dive deeper into how this applies to the AEC industry, let me clarify something important about the 80 20 rule.
While we call it the 80 20 rule, these numbers aren't set in stone. In reality, the ratio might be 70 30, or maybe it's 85 15, or 9 10. Here's what really matters. A small percentage of your effort tends to produce a disproportionately large percentage of your results. So back to my code hook story. By focusing on just 20 percent of the tasks on my list, and identifying those two crucial items, probably accounted for 80 percent of the project's success.
But it could have been that those two items were really 15 percent of my list and produced 85 percent of the impact. The, the number and the ratio doesn't really matter. Now think about your current project or what you're working on. Maybe 70 percent of your client's satisfaction comes from 30 percent of the impact.
of the design elements. Or 90 percent of construction issues arise from just 10 percent of the building details. Again, the exact numbers aren't what's important. It's understanding and acting on this unbalanced relationship between your effort and the outcome. So this is why my project manager's advice was so valuable.
She wasn't just telling me to do less work. She was teaching me to identify and to focus on the elements that would create the most value. It's about working smarter, not harder. And something I wish I'd learned earlier in my career. So, with all that said, let's take a look at three key areas where the Pareto Principle can transform your own workflows.
And let's start with design. So, if you walk through any great building, you'll probably notice that two to three spaces define that entire experience. So, if we're at the Guggenheim in New York, it's going to be that central atrium and that ramp. At Fallingwater, It's the living room and how that cantilevers over the stream.
And then the Disney concert hall, it's the lobby spaces in the concert hall itself, uh, with that organ right there on the stage, everything else around it supports these key spaces. Let me share another example from my own experience. And back when I was working as an architect, we were doing a mixed use building in Boston.
It was a developer project, so the budget was tight, and every dollar that we spent on design needed to be justified. Instead of trying to make every space spectacular, we identified the massing, the façade pattern, and the design. And the main lobby as our crucial areas. And we invented, invested most of our design energy in our budget there.
And we use simpler, more cost effective solutions on the less important back of house spaces. The result, well, the client loved it because we stayed on budget and we got a design that we felt. really good about. Next, take a look at your documentation. In my experience, 80 percent of RFIs cluster around 20 percent of the drawings in the set, and it's usually the complex intersections that cause problems.
The roof to wall connections, the system coordination points, any kind of material transition. Identifying these hotspots earlier in the process lets you focus your documentation effort where it matters most. Now I learned this lesson the hard way. on an early project where we spent a lot of hours detailing all the conditions in the building to the same level of development.
During construction, most of the RFIs came from just a handful of the more complex conditions where we hadn't spent that extra time they needed. We should have identified these critical areas early, maybe even in DD. And then, uh, A lot, a bunch of time to make sure that they resolve themselves and that we wouldn't get these RFIs.
And that would have saved us a ton of headaches later on in the process. The third, let's look at client relations. So quick story. One firm I worked at, we had a partner who tracked client interactions for three months. Guess what? 80 percent of the firm's repeat business came from just 20 percent of their clients.
So the company leadership adjusted their approach and they focused more attention on these key relationships. And their repeat business doubled within a year. Now this doesn't mean ignoring other clients, far from it. But it does mean being strategic about where you invest your relationship building energy.
For instance, scheduling regular check in with key clients, even when you don't have active projects with them. Or sharing industry insights with those clients. Or discussing long term plans and building deeper relationships. This proactive approach can lead to more repeat business and better project outcomes for everyone.
So how do we put this into practice? Let me share a framework I call FOCUS. And it's helped me and others implement the AD20 rule effectively. So F in FOCUS stands for Find Your Baseline. First, spend a day tracking everything that you do. And I mean everything. Every meeting, every drawing revision, every client call.
Don't try to change anything yet. Just observe the process. All the things that you do that I like to use my notebook, but you can also use a notes app on your phone. The key here is to capture your current state before making any changes. Next up is O for organized by impact. Take that list you did in the previous step and rate each activities impact on a scale from one to five.
And you need to be brutally honest here. That perfect bathroom tile pattern you spent 3 hours on, it's probably a 1 or 2. Now that hour you spent refining the building's entrance sequence, that's likely a 5. Now here's a tip, ask yourself, if this were the only thing I got right, Would the project still be successful?
Next up is C for classify your time. So group your activities into three categories. You have high impact work, which is your vital 20%. You have supporting work, which is necessary, but. Not critical. And then you have your, your low value tasks. These are things that you could standardize or even eliminate.
For example, maybe you're working on a healthcare project. Your high impact work would include, you know, the waiting spaces, the public spaces, patient room layouts, and nurses station, supporting work could include. You know, your typical quarter details and then low value tasks would be sort of standard details that could be pulled from a library.
All right. Next up is U for unleash your resources. This is where you realign your time and your team to focus on the vital few. You want your best people working on the high impact tasks, then you want to use templates or standard for supporting work. And really you want to eliminate or completely automate the low value tasks.
Now, this also helps, it also helps to block out time, focus time for high impact work. And maybe it's mornings like today. When your energy is at the highest, that's what works for me. But just being able to carve out specific time for that high impact work is really important. Last but not least, S stands for sustain and adjust.
So this isn't a one time exercise. Set up weekly check ins to assess your task list and ask yourself, are you spending most of your time on high impact work? What low value tasks? Keep creeping back into your schedule and are there new opportunities for standardization or automation that you've discovered?
I have a colleague who recently did this and he noticed that he was spending way too much time in routine coordination meetings. So he switched his project team to using a simple email check in process for updates and that kept meetings going. only for critical decisions when you needed everybody's input.
So this one change freed up about two hours per week for everybody on the team. And that's time that could now be spent on more high impact work. Remember this framework isn't about doing less work. It's about being intentional with your efforts. And this approach. Also works great for any kind of work.
Now I don't work on design projects anymore, but I was able to apply the focus framework on automation projects that I'm working on. Recently, my team met to discuss our upcoming projects, and there were a lot of items on the list from big web application tools that every engineer is going to use to more specific.
Revit tools that work within a project context. Now we applied the 80 20 rule and we focused on developing the tools that are going to have the biggest impact on our daily workflows. And using this lens helped us avoid getting bogged down on nice to have tools that aren't going to significantly improve our overall productivity.
Here's your challenge for the week. Pick a project you're working on and identify it's vital 20%. What are the items or tasks that will make or break this project? Which details absolutely must be perfect? What conversations are crucial? Then focus on only those items for the week. And come Friday, assess where you are.
Have you made significant progress by only focusing on the vital few? Are there items from the remaining 80 percent that you're able to let go of or automate away? Remember, this isn't about cutting corners or doing less. It's about being strategic with your time and energy. It's about making sure your best efforts go toward the elements that truly matter.
Alright, if you found this approach helpful, hit that subscribe button. I'm Michael Kilkelly from Arc Smarter, reminding you that sometimes the most important thing is knowing what's not important. Thanks for listening.
