Last week, a coachee opened our call by telling me that his perfectionism was, in his words, "fucking him hard."

I could hear how worn down he was. The day before, he'd spent three hours rewriting an investor blurb. The night before a presentation, he'd stayed up past midnight finishing slides. This is a founder running a venture-backed company with paying customers, a team that needs him present, and a sales pipeline that doesn't move unless he picks up the phone.

And he was editing slides.

When I called it out, he didn't argue. He said, "I get it. I try to follow the 80/20 principle."

80/20 sounds smart. It's called The Pareto Principle, and every operator references it in their LinkedIn bio (usually right before doing whatever they were already planning to do anyway). But for founders like him, 80/20 is a permission slip. It gives you cover to keep doing the comfortable thing while telling yourself you're being strategic.

The smartest founders and operators I know don't do 80/20. They do 100/0.

80/20 lets you keep lying to yourself

People reach for 80/20 because it lets them feel rigorous without making a hard choice. You can spread your 20% across five things and feel productive all day. You spend a little time on the investor update, a little time on the deck, a little time on the customer call, and by dinner you've touched everything and moved nothing.

It's like hiking a mile up five different trails. You'll be exhausted by the end of the day, and you will have summited exactly nothing.

We like preserving optionality, founders most of all. We default to the small, controllable things because they give us a sense of progress. Slides feel productive because you can watch them get better in front of you. You can justify three hours on them by telling yourself you need a great presentation to close customers. What you actually need is to send the email asking for the meeting.

80/20 keeps that justification alive. The 100/0 Rule takes it away.

What 100/0 actually looks like

A few years back, I coached a founder in the middle of a tier-one fundraise. He also had a friends-and-family round he was supposed to close. The friends and family round felt urgent. People were waiting on him, and the emails were piling up. Nine out of ten founders would have split their attention and tried to do both.

He ignored the friends and family round completely for five or six weeks.

He told me, "My friends and family matter to me, and I don't have enough time to do everything. So I'm going to focus on the tier-one conversations that actually move the company. Everything else can wait."

Is it an asshole move to make your own friends and family wait six weeks while you chase institutional money?

Here's how it ended. He closed the tier-one lead. Then he went back and closed the friends and family round in a single week, because now he had a tier-one anchor to point to. The people who waited ended up with a stronger round than the one they would have gotten six weeks earlier.

That's the 100/0 Rule. It looks brutal from the outside. From the inside, it's the only thing that works.

I try to run my own life this way, too. If I'm writing, I'm really writing. If I'm coaching, I'm really coaching. If I'm with my family, I'm fully there. And I let whatever the main focus of the season is take up as much space as it needs. Not every season has the same 100, but something always gets it, and that means other things genuinely sit at zero. I have to be okay with that, and some days I'm not.

And if you're an operator rather than a founder, you probably can't ignore an entire workstream for six weeks (your CEO might have notes). The 100/0 Rule still works at the scale of a day: one thing gets your best hours, and everything else gets batched around it.

The daily questions

Remember my coachee with the midnight slides? Before we hung up, I gave him two questions to ask himself every morning:

1️⃣ What is the single most important thing I need to get done today? 
Urgent is not the same as important. Pick the thing that, if it got done, would make today count. Most founders can answer this on the first pass, which should tell you the problem was never clarity.

2️⃣ What gets zero attention until that thing is done? 
Say it out loud or write it down: the slides, the inbox, the workflow you've been itching to reorganize. Naming what you're NOT doing matters as much as naming what you are.

Then I added a third question, because I know how founders cheat:

3️⃣ What seems urgent and important that I'm purposefully putting off, and is that the right call? 
This is the pressure valve. Sometimes the answer is that a fire genuinely needs you today. Most of the time, the fire can burn for another day without taking the building down.

We set this up recently, so I can't tell you yet whether the midnight-slides habit is broken. Ask me in a month. What I can tell you is that choosing the most important thing is the easy part. Giving everything else zero is what takes discipline, along with noticing when you start drifting back toward the comfortable, controllable busy work.

Making people wait is a form of respect

I'll give you one more story. Another founder I worked with was notoriously bad at texting. People would send him a question and not hear back for two weeks. It made his team and his investors a little crazy at first.

When I asked him about it, he said, "Regina, I value and respect your time so much that I only want to respond if I can give you 100% of a response. I would rather wait two weeks and give you a really damn good answer than text back and forth every ten minutes when I'm not even fully present."

I've never forgotten that. Most people apologize for being slow to respond. He decided that a partial answer was the disrespectful option, and that what he actually owed you was his full attention, whenever he could give it. And once the people around him figured out the answers were worth the wait, the crazy mostly wore off.

Now, I am not telling you to go dark on your team for two weeks (please don't). But there's a scaled-down version of this available to everyone: stop answering things at 40% attention just to feel responsive. That's what the 100/0 Rule gives you that 80/20 never will: depth, and the willingness to make people wait so the work gets done well.

If you've been telling yourself you're doing 80/20 and the most important thing on your list keeps slipping to tomorrow, try the 100/0 Rule for a week. Pick one thing each day. Give it everything. Let the rest sit, and watch what happens.

What's the one thing on your plate today that deserves your 100?

Until next time,

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