Participate/Take Action

In the spirit of the election, I thought I would share a tidbit learned from a previous job, and something that has been important for the detail-oriented person that I am to practice:

Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

As we think about who should be the next president, or should fill other positions, it's important to consider from among the options we have -- and move forward. Take a step. Any step.

You can spend tons of time to make the right decision, but what is the value of that extra time? Are you wasting time that could be spent moving forward on that decision (whether right or wrong) and getting a better idea of whether your decision made was actually the right one? Sometimes planning too much is over-planning.

One example - start to write a paper after making a basic outline and doing adequate research, but then you decide that your hypothesis wasn't right, or that you don't have enough research. But now you have a more clear understanding of what was lacking and can either start over or work from what you have.

In software development there is a term for planning just a few steps at a time. Agile software development has you develop and complete baby-steps of the software development life cycle (from requirements to ready-for-release) rather than planning and developing larger scale development projects - that might be more likely to be delayed, have bugs, etc.

While micro-projects or minimal planning may not be the best for all situations, this can sometimes be an efficient way to get things done. You move forward on something, even if the overall picture isn't complete. And any action, including voting -- is getting us one step closer to where we'd like to be, even if we don't see the complete picture or know if it's the right complete picture.