Day 309 - Pareto Principle

giant jenga

Today was another transformational day, in that I completed the transformation of the pile of logs on the lawn to the stack of wood outside the back door. 

(for some reason, Google decided to Auto-Awesome the photo I initially uploaded, and I quite like the effect, so I've used that version instead)

I must admit, it's not packed to my usual high standards...there's far too much air in this structure, and the logs are in no way efficiently stacked...it's not the most stable free-standing block of wood!

This was mostly to do with having a different process this time.  Previously, when stacking logs, they've all been dumped in a huge sprawling pile on the concrete you can see in the front of this shot.  

So when building my Giant Jenga Puzzle, I can pick the right log each time, and so construct a tightly packed cube fairly easily.  

This time, the wood was not so helpfully positioned some distance away on the lawn...

thanks

I enlisted the help of a small plastic crate, into which I could fit around a dozen logs, which (conveniently) was about as many as I could easily carry at once (in terms of weight).

So instead of cherry picking the most appropriate log for that moment, I was simply grabbing the first twelve I came to under the edge of the pile...obviously then when stacking, I was limited to only those I had in the crate...and in fact, only the top layer....rather than selecting from many dozens logs, I was forced to select each time from half a dozen or less.

Hence the loose, unstable log-pile you see at the top. 

However, it was a good lesson in the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, a rule of thumb that states that 80% of outcomes can be attributed to 20% of the causes for a given event...

A helpful way of looking at this idea is to consider that you get 80% of the benefit of a task in the first 20% of the time spent...the Law of Diminishing Returns asserts that the last 20% of the benefit will be increasingly expensive, ultimately taking 80% of the time.

I only spent the 20% of the time necessary to do a Quick and Dirty stack, and so achieved most of the benefits (a stacked pile of logs outside the back door), only missing out on the additional efficiency of a more solid structure...

And ultimately, does it even need to be efficiently packed?  

I suppose there's marginally less likelihood of a collapse...but even then, would a collapse be disastrous?  It'd just require a minor rebuild...and I'm not short on space, especially as it's just the vertical space directly above the stack...

So I saved myself all the additional time of trying to stack it perfectly, and it's unlikely to have any detrimental effect whatsoever...so all that additional (wasted) time spent would have simply meant more inefficiency in the system than the inefficiency that the poor stacking introduces...

I think I can call that a net win.

The 80/20 rule...worth using!

B-)