Are your projects 110s, 80/20s, or 50/50s?

Everyone I know who does great work obsesses over quality from time to time. And I mean really obsesses.

From Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci:

A peasant who worked in Vinci one day made a small shield of wood and asked Piero to take it to Florence and have it painted.

Piero gave the task to Leonardo, who decided to create a terrifying image of a dragon-like monster breathing fire and belching poison. To make it naturalistic, he assembled parts from real lizards, crickets, snakes, butterflies, grasshoppers, and bats. “He labored over it so long that the stench of the dead animals was past bearing, but Leonardo did not notice it, so great was the love that he bore towards art,” Vasari wrote.

When Piero finally came to get it, he recoiled in shock from what in the dim light appeared at first to be a real monster. Piero decided to keep his son’s creation and buy another shield for the peasant.

This dragon artwork represents what I call a "110 project." I put projects [1] into three buckets: 50/50 projects, 80/20 projects, and 110 projects.

• A 50/50 project is one you engage based on how you happen to feel at a given moment. Watching Netflix, hanging with friends, scrolling social media, relaxing on a beach. It's mood-driven. If you're in the mood, you do it. If not, you don't. 50/50.
• It's an 80/20 project if it follows the Pareto principle: you do the 20% of the work that will deliver 80% of the results. Usually this applies to projects you have to work on but don't want to work on. Or projects you think you want to work on but which mostly serve as means to the ends you truly want. Going to the gym to look good in a bathing suit. Reading a book to sound smart in front of others. Preparing TPS reports to avoid getting fired. And so on. When thinking about these projects, you'll often use terms like "diminishing returns" and speculate on the ROI on your time, energy, and attention.
• This bean counting goes out the window with 110 (110%) projects. If 80/20 projects are about satisfying standards, 110 projects are about setting standards. Your central preoccupation becomes making the thing better, and a desire for "efficiency" only enters the equation when a deadline approaches or other demanding projects intrude on your attention. The zoomed-in view of working on a 110 project might look like a flow state, and the zoomed-out view might look more like "passion" or "obsession" or "perfectionism."

I was discussing this with a friend a few days ago, and she said: "So basically it's a spectrum between play and work. 50/50 projects are play, 80/20 projects are normal work, and 110 projects are really hard work."

This felt off to me, but I couldn't put my finger on why. Then it hit me:

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Footnote:

[1] I've always liked David Allen's definition of "project" from Getting Things Done:

I define a project as any desired result that can be accomplished within a year that requires more than one action step. This means that some rather small things you might not normally call projects are going to be on your Projects list, as well as some big ones.