Not to brag (well, maybe a little), but I’ve always gotten a lot of positive feedback about how much I’m able to get done in a limited amount of time. And I think there’s really one key secret I’ve learned throughout my work to accomplishing this, which I’m happy to share a bit more about.
This particular gleaning also comes in the light of recently starting to read Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Throughout the book, Ries talks (almost lovingly) about that first version of the software – buggy, seemingly missing important features, and generally not something the team can totally be proud of – and how it’s important to simply let it out in the wild. Why? Because the goal is not to be proud of your work at this point, it’s about embracing that you don’t know what you don’t know and seeking to find that out.
And I think that sums up my personal secret to accomplishing more.
The magic of good enough
One of the lessons I’ve learned through my long-time hobby of recording music in a minimal home studio setup is that the key to productivity is really about recognizing the magic of “good enough”. With all the constraints of equipment, space, and skill, “good enough” is a phrase you eventually learn to use with pride.
This is a lesson that has translated very well to other aspects of my life – from developing software to building teams to writing this blog post.
It may sound counterintuitive at first. The industrial machine at large talks about the pursuit of perfection in many of its success stories. The general public likewise regards perfectionism as an admirable quality to have as a leader (or, at the very least, an acceptable “weakness” to mention in job interviews). Perfection and the pursuit of it is the basis of a lot of business philosophies like six sigma, and I don’t doubt at all that it’s crucial in a lot of operations, like manufacturing and services.
But when it comes to pursuits of creativity (and let me emphasize that I put software development in this category), it just doesn’t translate quite as well. As “knowledge workers”, our value is not only in producing things, it’s in finding out things. And accomplishing that means being willing to start off with something less than ideal.
Perfecting imperfection
Now you might see imperfection as a lazy way out. But I’m here to argue otherwise.
Imperfection definitely might be an outcome of lazy work, but deliberate imperfection takes a lot more work than you might think. To be deliberately imperfect means to first build up a lot of context and a strong understanding of what’s really important. And it means having to make a bold prediction on the impact of your work.
The value of imperfection is illustrated in the Pareto principle, which says that 80% of the results can be accomplished by 20% of the work. Doing the math, that implies you’re going to need to spend four times that much effort to get you from 80% to perfection.
Sometimes it’s worth it. But as you can imagine, most of the time it isn’t. When “perfection” is based on a lot of assumptions, it probably isn’t worth it. When “perfection” is not something that will make much of a difference down the line, it definitely isn’t worth it. Quality is relative to requirement, after all.
And recognizing all of that is what perfecting imperfection means. It’s about running a tiny cost-benefit analysis and knowing precisely when “good” becomes “good enough”.
Time and productivity
… the most tangible part of our work is not automatically the most important.
Now that you might be spending less time on getting things done, you might worry about what kind of message that sends out about your productivity. After all, if you’re spending a fifth of the time in accomplishing 80%, shouldn’t you be getting paid less?
First of all, the 80% time you didn’t spend on perfecting that one thing is time that could go into making other equally important things happen. And as we should all know by now, time spent is never a good measure of productivity.
There’s this old anecdote about a plumber that goes, in my own paraphrased words, like this:
A plumber gets called in for a job to take a look at a leaky faucet. The homeowner is distraught as he had already tried a lot of things and nothing worked.
The plumber takes a look at the pipes underneath the sink, pulls out a wrench from his toolbox, makes one twist on a valve, and stops the leak instantly. The homeowner was relieved.
When the plumber writes up the bill, however, the owner becomes a little less excited. “$200? But all you did was twist a valve and it took you two seconds,” he complains.
“Let me break it down then,” the plumber confidently responds. “That’s $2 for twisting the valve, and $198 for knowing which valve to twist.”
And this is really what “value” is about in our line of work.
My boss sums this up neatly. He always talks about how, as software developers, our most productive work often doesn’t happen on a keyboard, but rather when we’re washing dishes, taking showers, even lying down to sleep. These are when the “lightbulb moments” happen, and we realize how we might fix the problems we’re facing or build what we need to build. And this is an insight I’m happy to relay to every creative person I work with.
What I’m trying to say is, the most tangible part of our work is not automatically the most important. We deliver code, for example, but the value comes in solving a business problem, not in the code itself.
A lot of our work undeniably involves thinking, observing, learning, and drawing inspiration, and those are things that aren’t bounded by time. So don’t worry too much if you feel like you’re spending a little less time doing the visible, hands-on work – that may just be the nature of your job. And if your company shares this same value, I’m sure they’ll appreciate it just as much.
Dexter is an engineering manager at Synacy, a co-founder of ATeam Business Software Solutions, and founder of TechManagement.Life. He loves to share his experiences and thoughts on managing software teams and running businesses.