The Perfect is often the Enemy of the Good

Claude Oppenheim, Ph.D., President
Oppenheim Education and Management Consulting

Some of us are so obsessed with doing everything as well as we can, that we become hopelessly bogged down. We need to learn, and to help those we manage to learn, to assess how much time and effort a particular task is worth.

There is no point in striving for perfection on a task at the expense of completing the many things for which we are responsible. Does every email have to be perfectly worded? Some certainly do, depending on the recipient and the sensitivity of the subject. But others can be quickly written, just to communicate the necessary information. How perfectly does the formatting of every document we produce need to be? One needs to balance "quality" with "quantity" and speed.

One way one can do this is to assess the consequences of work being less than perfect. If the consequences will be serious, obviously we must take the time to make it as good as we can. But if not, we need to decide just how much effort it is worth.

Making this assessment takes experience. But we have to remember that "the perfect is the enemy of the good", and to learn to assess at what point something is good enough, and further refinement would be a waste of time that could be better spent elsewhere.

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