Pareto inversed

The pareto principle says that—in certain situations—80% of the output will result from of 20% of your input.

In the context of marketing, sales, and design, this means that you can dramatically improve a website, product, or app by focusing on a tiny fraction of tasks.

It also means that there are hundreds of things you can do that with only marginally improve your work. Those things account for the other 80%.

Being able to discern between the 20% of things you should do versus the other 80% of things you can do is the knowledge component of knowledge work.

Having the discipline, people skills, and nerve to stand up for the 20%—to focus on big, macro changes in a sea of minutia—is the human component.

Which is why it rarely gets done.