[Millennium]

I really wish I could stop seeing this everywhere I went. I get that there are people who need this kind of advice, but for someone like me, this advice is poison. For everyone who needs to be carefully and constantly reminded that you can't let the perfect become the enemy of the good, there's someone else, maybe several someones, who need to be carefully and constantly reminded that "good enough" is almost never good enough. And this latter group, when left unchecked, tends to do a lot more harm than the former.

[rtpg]

This is definitely in the category of advice (much like GTD) of "if you don't think you need this advice, you probably don't need it."

I feel like there's an alternate wording for this advice that is less "cut corners" and more "determine how many corners you don't want cut".

Maybe involving a target condition? You want to make the best thing possible. Keep on aiming for the best, but establish a baseline that you would find acceptable. Maybe you won't make something perfect, but you'll now have a target that you _can_ get to.

This thought process reframes the discussion of "good enough" away from "did I spend enough time on this? Surely I can spend another week and make it 10% better" to "Does this meet the requirements". There is no longer a debate to be had, just a yes or no question to answer.

So when people ship things that just aren't good enough you don't have a discussion around spending more time on things or being more careful, you have a discussion around what your baseline requirements are (which is _actually_ what you care about).

[Millennium]

This makes sense to a certain degree, but "just ignoring it" only goes so far: even seeing it is corrosive to a certain extent, and by the time you've even registered it enough to ignore it, a lot of the damage is done.

Perfectionists undergo a similar phenomenon, I'm told. After all, the modern "Do it badly" movement was itself a response to the corrosive effect of the "'Good enough' isn't" message permeating all of society. I'm not unsympathetic. In solving one problem, it didn't exactly create another -we've always had perfectionists to some extent- but it made that problem much, much worse than it had once been. But the fact is, it was done to solve a real problem in its own right, and that problem has not gone away.

What it comes down to is conflicting needs. The all-pervasive "'Good enough' isn't" came about because some people genuinely need it, and they genuinely need it at that level. The same is true of the now-pervasive "Do it badly": it is genuinely needed, and at this level. And you can't balance them, because they inherently undermine each other. So what do you do?

[aswanson]

Hey, nobody said it was perfect advice. :)