perfect enough

Stephen Covey was the first author I know to make the distinction between doing work which is urgent rather than doing work which is important.

The idea here is that many of us get caught up fighting short term fires, oiling the squeaky wheel or handling "apparent" emergencies at the expense of working on the activities that add real long-term value. Much of what appears in front of me as urgent "must-do-right-now-or-the-wheels-fall-off-the-wagon", proves out in the longer term not to have mattered at all, or at least to have mattered very little. Meanwhile, what truly matters, what is whispering rather than screaming for my attention, gets bumped to the back burner of low priority items.

Many really successful people discover this the painful way as they achieve material success at the expense of marriages, relationships with children, health and free time to spend on interesting hobbies and other intellectual pursuits outside of business–all the stuff that proves out to be the important stuff, but did not appear to be so at the time.

Dimension one then is a focus on the important rather than the merely urgent.

Another pursuit that is equally troubling is perfectionism. The drive towards perfection is a really the perversion of the drive towards excellence. Perfectionism is a very destructive force that operates under the mindset that "nothing is ever good enough" (or the more personal "I'm not good enough.") The mindset under the drive towards excellence is the idea that "things can always be made better". This mindset opens up possibilities of creativity and innovation without activating the law of diminishing returns brought on by perfectionism.

At some point in the process of improving something, we attain a place where it is good enough and sufficient to satisfy the requirements and expectations of our customers or other patrons. All the work we do past the point of sufficiency adds genuine value–it does make the thing better–but in a way that does not really matter as much to the people we serve. This is the point of diminishing returns when we would be better served investing all that energy, attention, creativity and other resources on improving other things that are not yet at that point of sufficiency.

Dimension two then is a focus on the sufficient rather than the perfect.

If we created a two by two matrix out of these two dimensions, I'd say that many of us are wasting our energy on trying to do urgent but unimportant tasks perfectly.

It seems to me that a better way to invest myself is working on important things to the point where they are sufficient to satisfy the requirements: to work on the things that really matter until they are "perfect enough".

For support on changing your mindset, go to http://stepup.net/.