Lessons in Finishing the Job
A long time ago (for me) when I was an undergrad at university, I had a discussion with some other students and a professor about knowing when an essay is complete enough to hand in. In some disciplines, such as math and science, there is a point in problem solving where an answer is found, an absolute, which is the trigger point for stopping the problem solving exercise and submitting your work. These are the black and whites, the binaries, where there is an identifiable dividing point between the unknown and known. But what about the greys? What about those disciplines that don’t have quantifiable answers, which are based on arguments and opinions? Since they do not produce quantifiable answers the problem solving exercise is seemingly endless.
My line of work – research and user needs assessments, information management consulting, information architecture design, user interface design, indexing, classification, search logic design, application development – constantly faces this challenge. So when is enough enough? When do you say when, when you know their isn’t an absolute answer to be found?
The answer that resonates the strongest with me is:
The best essay is a done essay
It’s a simple concept. But for an undergrad student it is a good mantra to learn. Before I learned this, research as an undergrad was a painful experience. I learned that professors were very accommodating for students like me who agonized in the pursuit of a brighter polish for their work. Getting an extension for deadlines was straightforward and seemed good at first, because you had more time to refine your essay. But after a while I learned it created backlogs and time management eddies as new deadlines approached for work not yet started. Instead of improving the situation this pattern of deadline deferment compounds the original problem and compromises the quality of the work. The quality of the first essay will likely improve, but at the cost of the quality of the subsequent essays. So the concept that the best essay is a done essay supports the view that you need to finish what you start within the time you have and move on so that you can maintain similar quality levels for future work. Of course for this to hold true you need to know your subject matter and have confidence in your abilities.
In professional life, many times I see people don’t know how to finish their work or projects. There are multiple reasons for this, and some are even valid, but in many cases they can be avoided. The reasons that annoy me most are:
- Involving too many people in the process, especially those who have no vested issue in the project’s final outcome. Don’t ask everyone in the organization to participate in the process, ask only those who bring the required opinions and expertise to complete the work and fulfill the tasks at hand. Bringing superfluous opinions into the project costs valuable project time and introduces the possibility of alienating people. After all, if you are going to ask someone to give input, out of respect you should at least address their contributions whether or not it was useful. The people management and communication skills required to pull this off requires time and effort, which needs to be closely guarded to keep projects on schedule and completed on time.
- Revision redundancy. There must be a strong urge within us to revise opinion-based work. Revisions are not bad, per se, but there is a point where you need to accept that the work will never be perfect. It will, however, be good enough to achieve the project’s original requirements. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen revision cycles lead right back to the original starting place.
- Too much noise and too many messages. Less is more. It takes courage to produce less, but the message will be clearer if you don’t obscure your analysis or recommendations in a nest of ideas, theories, visual or cognitive images. Break out what is the heart of the matter and express it clearly, while setting the other secondary ideas aside. You need to know that a project is done when it’s done. Many times people cannot resist the urge to do more than is needed, perhaps because the answer seemed so simple that they need to show more effort was invested.
Now to hold true to this revelation that the best essay is a done essay, and that less is more, I will end this blog entry right here. Or right here, or here …
Done.
Posted by Chris Savage at September 19, 2006 10:42 AM
