We all fail, all the time. We might miss a call with a client because of an emergency work meeting, or miss that meeting because another project has suddenly become urgent. And then we (or our families) get sick, and we have to shift priorities around again.
These unsystematic failures are benign, though. They reflect that all of us have limited resources. There simply is not enough time, energy, or money, to do everything you want to do all the time. Part of being a responsible adult is learning to make tradeoffs: balancing your conflicting goals and trying to get as much done as you can in the time you have.
Unsystematic failures can also help you calibrate the right approach to the specific tradeoff between effort and accuracy. If you fail occasionally, you’re probably hitting the right balance. If you fail too often, you’re probably not putting in enough effort. If you never fail, then chances are you are spending too much time on most of your projects, because in general, the longer you work on a project, the better it gets. By polishing a particular project to a high gloss, you’re giving yourself less time for other things that require your attention. The trick is to figure out how much effort is enough for each project, so that over time, you manage to take care of most of the things you need to do and do them well enough.
More here – Harvard Business Review
Unnecessary perfectionism is very expensive. In my experience, the 80:20 rule seems to go exponential after 80% of the gains are made. This explains why Aircraft cost so much to build and run – they have to be as near to perfect as we can make them.
It also explains how legislation is killing the economy. Every little failure is greeted with more legislation as the bureaucrats try to protect everybody from everything. in the end we suffocate under all the cotton wool being wrapped around us. Human recourse departments probably just are a smaller version of the same thing 🙂