The 80/20 Rule: A Guild Hall Post-Mortem
I have a stupidly-high attention-to-detail that can be misconstrued as perfectionism. I have a theory that there’s two different flavors of creatives: those that dream up ideas and crank them out as fast as possible, worry about the imperfections later, but have moved on to the next idea already, and those that take it a little slower, checking off boxes as they go, sticking to a plan. This clash of two different types of creatives sums up my experience as a designer at The Guild Hall, a startup hub.
I’m the second flavor.
I take the time to research, plan, and work at a comfortable pace to produce work I believe is solid, which should reduce the need to go back and re-iterate, or re-design over and over. I put 100% of myself into my work.
During my time there, I heard frequently of the 80/20 rule, and how we interpreted it: just get it 80% of the way done and we’ll figure out the other 20% later. Everything was always high-priority, because we took on too much at once. Usually the 20% boiled down to UX problems that I wanted to address before even thinking of launching a project. Sometimes the 20% was just not-proofreading work before posting it publicly online, or over-promising features/ideas, not caring how it might be perceived if we didn’t deliver. As a designer, this put a lot of stress on me when I saw ideas executed “imperfectly” or prematurely launched that could have been easily “perfected”.
I learned to work even more quickly, doing all sorts of things, spending most of my time at work, and working from home, much more than I had in my previous position in San Francisco, where I also had a hand in all-things-design. Previously, I’d thought that I could work in an overly-casual environment with a lack of boundaries. An environment that changed, literally, day-to-day. There was a lot of turnover, even during my short 10 months with the company. It was even joked about that there’d be a countdown until it was my turn to be so “salty” that I’d leave! Even with the non-ideal environment, I worked with a few extremely talented friends that have gone off to become successful in their own creative endeavors.
I look back on my position at The Guild Hall with mixed feelings. There’s so much I wanted to do, so much I did do, but I wouldn’t change a thing, because it really changed my perspective on “startup life” and pushed me into becoming a freelancer.
