The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes (the âvital fewâ). Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.
You should take another look at your priorities, concentrate on the most important tasks and delegate the secondary tasks. Do not hesitate to stop the projects that are not profitable and are making you waste time as well as human and financial resources.
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production.
This law makes you always think of the worst, pushes you to anticipate potential problems and to relflect on solutions to limit them, or indeed eliminate them.
In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ËdÊÉvÉnz/; sometimes Jevons' effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand. The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics. However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.
The DunningâKruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to some false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.
Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".
Set reasonable and realistic deadlines for the accomplishment of your tasks and make regular points to follow progress.
Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand. This bias is also called by some authors the curse of expertise.
Carlson Law (not really a law)
Carlsonâs Law is about the negative impact of involuntary breaks. Taking much-needed and deserved intentional breaks is one thing â getting involuntarily distracted is another. It is proven: interruption seriously wrecks productivity.
Reduce interruptions as much as possible. Only consult your emails twice a day, avoid multitasking, start a task and finish it before passing onto the next one, and isolate yourself to work as soon as possible.
Illichâs Law says that âbeyond a certain threshold, human efficiency decreases, even becoming negative.â It is Ivan Illich, an Austrian ecologist thinker, who came up with this principle. Beyond 90 minutes spent on a task, our attention and our effectiveness diminishes. The more we try to continue working, the less high performing we are. If you do not manage to finish a task, stop worrying and take a break.
Learn to take breaks. At noon, take a real lunch break. Go and eat outside on your own or with colleagues or leave to take a walk, but avoid eating a sandwich in front of your screen. Your brain needs breaks to be productive.
According to Henri Laborit, a French surgeon and neurobiologist, our behaviour drives us to do what makes us happy first. At work, our instinct makes us avoid stress. It is because of this that we procrastinate, in other words we postpone a task until the next day. Laboritâs Law is also nicknamed âThe Law of the Least Effortâ, underlining the fact that we prefer to carry out tasks that give us immediate satisfaction.
Start your workday with the most difficult/hard task, then offer yourself a reward as soon as it is finished. Plan your days in advance depending on the difficulty of your activities.
Also known as the Law of Schedule Slipping, Hofstadterâs Law says that âit always takes longer than expected, even taking into account Hofstadterâs Law.â It was stated by Douglas Hofstadter, an American academic, in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach : an Eternal Golden Braid (Pulitzer Prize) published in 1979. For Hofstadter, we are often wrong in the evaluation of the time needed to carry out a project, either by ignorance of the work to be done, or to please the hierarchy by voluntarily announcing shorter deadlines. However, deadlines are delayed and schedules slip and shift.
The project manager and their team should estimate more fully the time needed to complete their project. Assume that it will inevitably fall behind. It is better to finish a project earlier than planned, rather than the other way around.
Occam's razor, also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony, is the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". It is generally understood in the sense that with competing theories or explanations, the simpler one, for example a model with fewer parameters, is to be preferred. The idea is frequently attributed to English Franciscan friar William of Ockham (c.â 1287â1347), a scholastic philosopher and theologian, although he never used these exact words. This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions,[3] and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions.
Brooks' law is an observation about software project management according to which adding more individuals to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer.
Braess's paradox is the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it.
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.