PhotoCredit: OneMoreCoat
This week has been a constant reminder of the statement "perfect is the enemy of good." Which is, evidently, not a statement - it's an aphorism* . It's also not even the original statement which was "the best is the enemy of the good" - Voltaire, 1770.
That is a lot of learning for one morning.
In my start-up days, the 'Just Ship It' rule was the living embodiment of Voltaire's caution. Perfecting code is somewhat elusive. Frankly, software spends most of its life in need of repair - just look to the endless app updates on your phone. Bugs are best revealed through live user testing, so best just get your product out the door.
In my legal days, the battle for good versus great lived through Parkinson's Law which states that a job will expand to fit the available time. If you give yourself all day to complete a project, it will always consume that full day. From a productivity perspective this is problematic on a couple of levels. Full days are as rare as unicorns and most projects will be better served by getting a quick start than laying dormant while you await that perfect day. Parkinson's law had a very early impact on me and has guided my approach to work across my career.
All these aphorism's, rules and laws sum to the same result. Time spent perfecting your work is your enemy. As a former colleague of mine used to elegantly say - you are just polishing turds.
Obviously, you still want to produce excellent work and my solve for this is using an iterative approach. Find a partner to collaborate with and feed them a draft of your work. Even better, create a team to get pieces of the project done. Teamwork tends to put get-it-done pressure on a project and has the added benefit of input from multiple brains.
I am also a huge fan of the Pomodoro Method to get good work out the door. Set a timer, give yourself 30-90 minutes on a project, and force yourself to stop with the buzzer. The results of creating scarcity of time will frequently exceed your expectations.
For maximum good-ness, pick some completion tasks and get cracking on them today. Carve out some 30 minute sessions and see how much you can output. Make it a game. Put some music on. Pour yourself a glass of wine at the end of the day to celebrate. Just make it a great glass of wine. In this context good IS the enemy of great.
*Aphorism - a pithy observation which contains a general truth. Oxford Dictionary.