Get It Done, Not Perfect

Blair Talks – by Blair Quane on 27th May 2024

In business, no matter if you’re just starting out or a seasoned professional, there can be the temptation to ensure that tasks and projects are perfect before completing them. This maybe a new ecommerce product for your Shopify store, or a new website redesign for your business, or even a simple weekly task like designing a new advert for your business social media account.

Any of these tasks can have the potential to occupy a huge amount of your time if you let them.

This is where the most effective business method comes into play:

Get it done, not perfect

The basis of this method is similar to the 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle, where 80% of the task is good and complete and 20% not so much. If you apply this method, you will save a whole heap of time and money and free yourself up for other tasks.

So, an example of this is the social media advert. What is getting it done, not perfect in this situation? Well, you may get the message and wording sorted out but your not super happy with the graphic to go with these. Getting it done, not perfect would be to post this advert with the text and average graphic rather than spending time to look for ‘the perfect’ graphic.

Why is this method important?

1. Getting it done, not perfect does not mean that you can’t then come back to the task and tidy it up later. It’s always there for you to choose a better time to resolve, so you have ultimate flexibility here.
2. You assume that the thing is not perfect and it may not be, in your eyes. However, it may be in your customer's eyes or even just not relevant to them. So, spending time trying to get it perfect may be a complete waste of time and even worse, may end up in a worse result!
3. This method allows you to move on to another task at pace, which in turn, allows you to focus on more tasks per week and that increases the growth of your business exponentially.

Where can you use this method?

Getting it done, not perfect can be used in not only your business but also in other areas of your life. It's such a flexible method that drives efficiency.

Using this method in a start-up business

This method is very good to use when starting a business simply because there are a lot of tasks, big and small, when doing a startup and so effective and efficient management of these tasks is critical to grow and grow quickly without getting stuck in the weeds.

How to use this method

Start off by setting an overall goal for the task and then break it down into steps. When doing each step, keep questioning what stage is the bare minimum of the step complete enough to move onto the next step. As soon as you reach that point, rather than refining what you’ve done, move on. If you do this throughout the task then you’ll find that you'll complete the task in the minimum time and meeting the original goal.

Conclusion

Getting it done, not perfect does take training, especially for those detail-oriented people out there. However, it is a simple and effective trick to keep tasks moving and your business growing without getting bogged down by detail.