The Eighty/Twenty Rule

I don't know if you've ever encountered the Eighty/Twenty Rule in your life, but it is intruding on my existence with a vengeance.

For those unfamiliar with this diabolical proportion, the Eighty/Twenty Rule says that when you set out on a task or work with people or do anything else with discrete parts that you can identify, eighty percent of the items will take twenty percent of the time and finishing the other twenty percent will take eighty percent of the time.  Sometimes I have seen people push it to Ninety/Ten, but that is the exception.

So here I am, in the middle of The Big Push To Finish EVERYTHING and the 80/20 has hit me on the head hard.  I am trying to finish committee appointments, calendar items, workshop arrangements and everything is running into the 80/20 wall.

For example, I had asked people to get me locations for their OVs and events back in February.  I sent a reminder at the beginning of May and now it is the middle of June.  As of last week, I had eight of thirty-nine districts who had not gotten me their information.  That's darn close to twenty percent.  So eighty percent got their stuff to me with two e-mails and the others needed to have individual district e-mails sent out.  Of those, several have gotten back to me and all but one has at least told me that they are working on it and provided me some status.  I have one that is just out in the weeds, I suppose, so I guess I will be picking up the phone tomorrow and seeing if I can reach anyone that way.

Same thing with committee people - I sent out many letters in May and have been doing additional batches each week since, as I work my way through the various committees, with an eye to being done with my mailing out by the end of the month if lucky, by July 13 if not lucky.  On my spread sheet, I note the date that I sent out the letter and the requested response date.  My eighty percent people get back to me.  The twenty percent run silent and deep.  I don't mind (much) that people sometimes can't serve because I can understand that.  It's chasing down the ones who don't respond that takes all the time.  Sometimes they've moved and that is perfectly understandable because they never got the letter, but evidently some people don't open their mail for weeks at a time.  How do people manage that?  I would go nuttier than I already am to have a big stack of mail unopened.  Of course it is also possible that they are on vacation.  Since I have not been able to be on vacation longer than one week at a time, maybe I just lack the experience to know how you can get weeks of mail and not open it.  Sigh!

At least, having gotten started, I am told that I have a fair chance of finishing on time.  And I do have it a lot easier than some who preceded me.  While I am sending letters for lots of things, there are also some things, like Grand Chapter Week committees, for which I can send e-mail instead and save a stamp.  And for following up, almost everyone has an e-mail address, so that is nice too.

I am told that once upon a time, we had so many members so eager to serve that Associate Grand Matrons could start sending out their letters in June and July and still fill all their positions by July 31 to make the print deadline.  Those must have been the days!  Of course, it is a good thing that it worked for them though, because they couldn't send out e-mail follow ups - for follow ups they had to call each person one at a time.  And there were no unlimited long distance plans either.  What their phone bills must have been!  No wonder everyone always did the asking by letter.  Postage was cheaper than the phone charges!  Wow!

Next weekend, I am staying home to keep getting out committee letters and work on the calendar and the workshop details.