The 98/2 Rule: Why Boring Work Wins

Silicon Valley’s secret sauce isn’t corporate labs or sexy startups. The most transformative technologies often emerge from the fringes. Chris Dixon calls these “outside-in” innovations.¹

Born from garages, dorm rooms, and hobbyist meetups there’s nothing sexy about these technologies in the beginning. 

Unlike their “inside-out” counterparts from Big Tech, these ideas start out scrappy and weird. Only the nerds geek out, because every tech nerd wants to feel like they’re living in the future (myself included).

The people building technologies on the edges have an advantage others in the “inside” don’t. They don’t care about flashy things.

Focus on the 98/2

You’re probably familiar with the Pareto Principle. The idea is often transferred to many different scenarios where 80% of something is caused by 20% of the total.

The Dutcher Principle, or the 98/2 rule, has more impact on your daily life. The idea was coined by Stephen Dutcher who works in IT. He noticed extraordinary resources were being directed to resolve an error that was happening 2% of the time.

The company was dedicating 98% of people, budget, and time resources to resolve a data collection error that happened 2% of the time. This drove no impact for the overall long-term strategy of the business.

The 98/2 rule, or Dutcher Principle, was born from this mistake.

Shane Parrish says, “we often fixate on the visible and exciting, overlooking that most success comes from consistently doing the mundane, unglamorous work that few notice.”² Broken things look like opportunity, yet often they’re a distraction from the real work.

These opportunities serve as false positive ideas.

The 98/2 rule can be explained as: 98% of time is spent talking about flashy things that drive 2% of the results, while forgetting that 98% of the results come from consistently doing the boring work.

Passion turns the mundane into magic

The Homebrew Computer Club was a collective group of computer nerds that inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. They were surrounded by people that loved what others saw as boring stuff. They spent 98% of their time tinkering with the computer boards until one day, they created the personal computer.

When you focus on the boring stuff long enough eventually the mundane will become sexy.

Linus Torvalds, a software engineer, coded Linux as a side project. Torvalds spent the evening and weekend coding away. Today, Linux is the largest open source operating system in the world.

Geeks and nerds are a positive thing here. These are outsiders, fueled by passion rather than paychecks. The 98% of work that others write off as boring is where they consistently exploit the 98/2 rule.

History has shown that today’s tinkering can become tomorrow’s trillion-dollar industry.

You’re only able to read this article right now because the web itself started as a quirky project in a Swiss physics lab.

The power of saying no to 2%

Steve Jobs said “deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do, that’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”³

To truly focus you have to say no to the 2% of things that make stuff sexy. Your time needs to be dedicated to doing the 98% boring work exceptionally well. That’s what continues to move the vision forward. 

Productivity is a series of actions: analyze, delegate, report, confer, decide, and track. These verbs are made tangible through our efforts every day. Every action links the verbs of productivity.⁴ 

You should not mistake these patterns for the essence of “real work”.

Productivity is not about sending emails or making spreadsheets; it’s about constantly asking “What’s going on? What are we doing? What should we be doing?” The goals may change but the fundamental questions remain the same. The 98/2 rule is the most important rule of your work to leapfrog competition.