Are you a perfectionist? Or even more dangerous – do you think you are not a perfectionist, but in reality you are? I’m not suggestion that searching for perfection is a bad thing – in some areas of life it is a necessity – but in others it is nothing less than a show stopper when it comes to productivity.
Most of us are aware of the 80/20 rule – roughly, it says that it will take 20% of the time to do the first 80% of anything, but 80% of the time to finish off the last 20%. Now, I think that of that last 20% that takes 80% of the time, you could apply the 80/20 rule again. For example, if you spend 100 minutes getting something perfect, then it was 80% complete after 20 minutes, but it took you 80 more minutes to finish it off – of that last 80 minutes you re-apply the 80/20 rule. Some simple math and we learn, to get something 96% complete takes 36% of your time.
So what? Well, if you are a perfectionist, then you will spend two-thirds of the time you spend on a task, finishing off just the last 4% of what you are doing. Let me give you an example of this. You are preparing a Powerpoint presentation for your team meeting tomorrow (I’m not going to suggest anyone ever prepares such a thing any further in advance!). It takes you three hours to do this – if you look at this in detail then you will find that after only an hour you were 96% done! The content was in, the slides where in the right order and contained the right amount of information, and you had a decent conclusion at the end. So what did you spend the last two hours doing? Making sure the logos were correct on each page, trying to work out how to put a section break in, spell checking and proof reading for the 10th time, re-writing and re-phrasing content that was perfectly etc. If you had stopped at 96% perfection, then you’d have completed the task in a third of the time.
Before I started writing this I had three e-mails to send off – all to friends. If I had done my usual process of write, review, re-phrase for better rhythm, check spelling, check grammer, and final read through – each would have taken me 5 to 10 minutes, or a total of 15 to 30 minutes. As they were to friends I decided that 96% would do (sorry guys!) and all three were sent in a total of 5 minutes. Plenty of time saved.
I’m not suggesting that everything you do is fits this broad brush, but have a quick think whenever you embark on something – would 96% perfection do?
