Jeroen Sangers

I am on the road again. Today I am traveling from Barcelona to Cyprus, spending over ten hours in airplanes and airports. No distractions, just me, so I could get a lot of job done. I carry a laptop computer, and already wrote some documents, I checked my e-mail and read all interesting news in Google Reader. I am in the ‘flow’, but will soon have to stop working. My laptop is running out of batteries, and I still have about half the trip to go. I searched in every corner of the airport, but haven’t found a single power outlet!

Many travellers nowadays carry laptop computers and other electronic devices, and most of those devices need electricity. Batteries only serve for some hours, so power outlets in airports would be useful to many travellers. I can’t imagine the number of productive hours lost each year in Milano alone! Please airports, give us power outlets.

A little bit more than one month ago, I started a new weblog called ‘El Canasto’ in which I write about Getting Things Done and personal productivity.

Until now I have written 28 posts meaning that I have been able to keep up with my initial schedule of at least one post every two days. I found it easy to find new material, and usually have about 10 posts in he pipeline.

The people have received the new blog very well. I have received 30 comments/trackbacks. Quite some bloggers have found my blog and have reposted or linked to my articles. The most popular post is my translation of David Seah’s compact calendar for 2007 with 2850 unique views. At this moment I am receiving about 200-400 visitors per day.

So far it has been a very positive experience for me. Even though it costs me a little bit more time to write in Spanish, I enjoy using this language and already learned some more. Of course I tell my visitors that I am not a native speaker, and hope they are willing to forgive my errors.

Little by little, this former humble little weblog is getting bigger and bigger. I hardly have the time to answer all the fanmail I receive, and have difficulties going out on the street. Bit some fans really go far in their adoration:

[Thanks ImageChef]

I just found out that I had completely forgotten the 9^th birthday of this weblog. On November 9, 1997 I announces, in Dutch, the launch of my news page, as the word weblog had not been invented yet.

Wow, nine years! Time flies when you’re having fun. Let’s see if I can do something special for next year’s anniversary. Of course I put the date in my agenda, so I won’t forget it!

I just wanted to look up some information, and I remembered having read about it in a webfeed in Google Reader. Without thinking I opened up Google Reader, ready to type in my query, but there was no search box!

How is it possible that the world’s biggest search company releases a product suited for search without adding a search function??? Google, you are missing a huge opportunity here.

Today I published the first entry on a new weblog: El Canasto.

El Canasto is my first blog in Spanish and has been created for two reasons. The first reason is that I have found very little material in Spanish about lifehacks and Getting Things Done, one of the topics I like to read about. There is clearly something missing in the Spanish weblog spectrum. The second reason is that I really want to improve my Spanish language skills, but don’t have the discipline to sit down and study. However, writing about stuff I like might give me the drive to learn more.

To set up El Canasto I used WordPress and the minimalistic Cutline theme. I spent some days making sure every word in the template has been translated correctly into Spanish, and have many plans more for optimizing the look & feel of this new site. But for the moment, it is more important to get rolling, so I published a first little entry. My plan is to maintain a higher posting frequency than on this blog or the Wizard of POS as I have much material and a lot of ideas for this blog.

For now I would like all my readers to have a look at El Canasto.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Source: Wikipedia

The Pareto principle was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population, but the same principle can be found in many other situations.

In most businesses, 20% of the customers account for 80% of the sales. And technical departments know that 80% of the problems are caused by only 20% of the clients. This is very interesting information for managers, who can use these numbers to steer their sales and support departments.

But how can we correlate the Pareto numbers for these two departments? Are the 20% that purchase the most the same customers that use most of your organization’s resources? Well, experience tells us that this is not the case: there usually are customers buying for huge amounts without ever needing the support department. The two Pareto principle are not correlated, so if we only look at the small group of customers responsible for 80% of the sales, you will find once again that 20% of that group is using 80% of the resources.

As there is no correlation, I can easily divide my customers into four distinct groups:

1. Clients generating 80% of the sales, but using only 20% of the resources;
2. Clients generating 80% of the sales and using 80% of the resources;
3. Clients generating 20% of the sales, but using only 20% of the resources;
4. Clients generating 20% of the sales and using 80% of the resources.

I put those four groups in a specific order. The first group is worth the most, as they bring in a lot of money at low costs and the fourth group is the most difficult group.

So should you just drop the customers in the fourth group? Of course not, as we are talking about a principle and not a fixed categorization. If you drop group four, and look again at the numbers, you will see that once again 20% of the customers account for 80% of the sales and 80% of the resources are used by only 20% of the clients. Customers who were in to top 20% before, not rank lower simple because you have less customers. If I have 100 clients, there are 20 clients in the top 20%, but if I drop 50 of them, the top 20% will be formed by only 10 customers. Of course, if you have to drop customers, because you haven’t got enough resources, make sure you drop clients from the fourth group, as the clients in the other three groups are worth more.

Dear spelling checker,

Please do not consider the internet as something holy. The internet is simply a technology for delivering information, just as the postal service or the cable television. There is nothing that makes the internet of a higher level than other things and ideas on this planet.

So please stop telling me that I should write internet with a capital i. It is internet and not Internet, did you get this?

Kind regards,

Jeroen Sangers Frustrated writer.