I’ve been talking to our girls about what jobs they want to do around the house. For some reason washing the car is pretty high on both their lists. (Putting away their clothes … not so much).
So I bought a high pressure water gun and asked my mate Mike what else I needed. Obviously, a snow cannon (possibly more about making the job fun than getting the car clean, but I’m all good with that). And some snow foam to go in the snow gun. And car wash fluid (this one sounds quite important). And a cleaning mitt. And microfibre cleaning cloths. And wheel cleaner. And wax treatment. And of course, leather conditioner.
As I said to Mike, car cleaning was a lot simpler when we were kids.
And then something very strange happened.
On the way to do school pickup I stopped at the local car wash. I only had a couple of minutes so I just put $2 in the machine and pressed the high-pressure rinse button. I basically just washed off the dust.
Two minutes and forty seconds later I was done. Giving the car a once over before driving off, I honestly couldn’t see the difference. Perhaps the wax treatment helps, but it’s hard to tell exactly how.
Of course, this is the Pareto principle in action. The first 20% of the effort gets 80% of the result.
I think for a lot of the stuff we do and the decisions we make 80% is good enough. Mostly we spend too long when just the rinse would do the job. And if we could stop when it’s good enough on most things we’d free up the time, energy, and attention for the few things that we should do really, really well.
PS So I was chatting with Seth Godin last week … well kind of. Akimbo is my favourite podcast, and generally the format is Seth riffs for the first half, and he answers questions for the second half. In last week’s episode he answered my question. You can hear me at the 12:12 minute mark asking about why we assert our moral authority at the start of books, and if there is any point doing so. Seth spends the next ten minutes answering the question. The short answer – there is no point to it.
