Aim for Good Enough
My friend and trusted colleague looked me in the eye yesterday and said, “Just do The Thing. Don't go for perfection. Just do it.”
I knew exactly what she meant. I took a deep breath, nodded my head, and said, “OK. I'll do The Thing and I won't go for perfection.”
As a recovering perfectionist, it's hard for me to aim for “good enough." Afterall, I love excellence! I've been rewarded my entire life for excellence. I take great pleasure in something being done to a super high standard.
But that comes with costs of time, energy, and resources. And sometimes it comes at the cost of being overwhelmed and not doing anything at all, paralyzed by not having enough time to get to that perfect standard.
My lean six sigma training taught me that “overproduction” is a form of waste. If you want something with two features and I build you something with ten features, those eight extra features are waste - no matter how awesome they are.
And the time, resources, and energy I spent creating them were wasted. Not because the thing I made you wasn't incredible. It almost certainly was! :-) But it wasn't what you needed or wanted. You probably won't use those features, and you certainly don't want to pay for what I overbuilt.
Heads up! This doesn't stop with us. Norms of perfection are contagious on a team. Once I asked a team member for a simple document summarizing some themes and actions. The team member was a consummate perfectionist-overproducer, like me, and created something 10X more elaborate and complex than I asked for. Then they invited other team members to contribute to it too. Before I knew it, everyone went down a rabbit hole producing something that I couldn't even use.
I learned that I have to model how to find the good enough standard, to be clearer about my requests, and to support others on my team who struggle with perfectionist tendencies too, creating safety for good enough.
When I ask new people who want to be Loving Leaders what they struggle with most, 75% reply time pressure and overwhelm. There are many different contributors to these time challenges. And over the coming weeks, I'll write about these here, exploring what saps our time and what we can do about these. For today…
If you are struggling with time pressure, try this: Aim for good enough!
As my friend advised me, don't go for perfection. Or if it helps, another way to frame that is to redefine “perfection” as getting clear about what's really needed by the user and then creating only what is needed, in the way it is needed, and nothing more.
Aiming for good enough can free up time to connect with team members, to breathe, to get other things done, to think and plan, or to celebrate and appreciate. To lead with love, love for yourself and others.
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