Simon Griffee
Design consulting, art direction, photography.

November 2011

Vista da Monte Pincio, Rome, Italy, November 2011

Published 2011 November 30

The Pareto Problem for Perfectionists

I was talking to my friend B.B. King of *x Admin about the problem of getting things done when one has perfectionist tendencies. I had mentioned the Pareto Principle, or 80–20 rule:

For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

At the time I couldn’t think of a pertinent example of why this was relevant to our discussion. Now I have one:

I’ve been thinking of changing the publishing system of this logbook to a static1 one such as Jekyll or Hyde, but I’m hesitating instead of making progress. I’m thinking too much of the 20 percent instead of getting the 80 percent done.

Static publishing systems will take care of 80% of my needs:

Instead of going ahead with it I’m worrying about the following, representing about 20% of the functionality I’d like:

I’ve thought about writing a local search script in JavaScript to parse a generated JSON or XML index of logbook content, of installing and configuring stuff such as Sphynx, of implementing a static publishing system in Django and then building search functionality using the same.

I realized that working on search would certainly take at least 80% of my time and would give me 20% of my needs, while implementing Jekyll or Hyde would take around 20% of my time, and give me 80% of my needs.

So: If you have perfectionist tendencies and want to get things done, beware of focussing too much on the hardest stuff. Better to get the easiest stuff out of the way first — do the simplest thing that could possibly work, so you get going. You can focus on the details, which do matter, later.

I have a headache now, but when it’s gone I’ll get to work on the static system set up and leave the search to Google, or for later!


  1. Static publishing systems such as Jekyll and Hyde are not servers, they’re converter scripts. They run when you update your site but don’t need to be running for your website to be live. You provide a source directory of text, images, etcetera, and the script converts it to a site directory containing HTML and other static files for uploading or pushing to any server. ↩︎

Largo Argentina, Rome, Italy, November 2011

Published 2011 November 28

Magnum Contact Sheets

Published 2011 November 26

Oh, yes! Oh yes! Going to London next month!

Dance Hall, San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, September 2011

Published 2011 November 23

Via del Corso, Rome, Italy, November 2011

Published 2011 November 22

Via Arenula, Rome, Italy, November 2011

Published 2011 November 20

Via Celimontana, Rome, Italy, July 2011

Published 2011 November 17

Via della Navicella, Rome, Italy, July 2011

Published 2011 November 16

San Filippo Neri, Rome, Italy, October 2011

Published 2011 November 15

Viale Aventino, Rome, Italy, September 2011

Published 2011 November 15

Via Merulana, Rome, Italy, October 2011

Published 2011 November 14

Viale del Parco del Celio, Rome, Italy, October 2011

Published 2011 November 13

LaStorta, Rome, Italy, September 2011

Published 2011 November 12

Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, Italy, October 2011

Published 2011 November 10

Porta San Giovanni, Rome, Italy, October 2011

Published 2011 November 9

Via Fabio Massimo, Rome, Italy, October 2010

Published 2011 November 8

Via di San Gregorio, Rome, Italy, September 2011

Published 2011 November 7

Viale Aventino, Rome, Italy, September 2011

Published 2011 November 7

Colosseo Metro, Rome, Italy, August 2011

Published 2011 November 2

Imperial War Museum, Duxford, England, July 2003

Published 2011 November 1

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