Avoid Total Perfection
There’s an old saying (to which I do not ascribe) that says, “Sometimes good enough really is.” Rarely have I seen that to be true in consulting work. But there’s another saying that I absolutely think is crucial to keep in mind: “Perfection is the enemy of completion.”
When you’re a consultant or a freelancer, your boss is someone who inevitably has a slightly different agenda from you. He hired you to carry out a specific task for which he presumably lacks either time or bandwidth. You’re a relatively expensive resource. He doesn’t really want to keep you around longer than it takes for the task to be completed or, in a best-case scenario, until he can get you to transfer your knowledge and skills to him or someone he can control more tightly.
There is a side consequence of this slight shift in relationship, though it may often apply equally well to employer-employee connections.
When you turn in work to clients, they feel duty-bound to put their mark on it. This can look like a few corrections to a report, code modifications or changes to color schemes in charts and graphs among a host of ways this shows up. But the last thing clients want is to give their bosses your work unchanged.
This isn’t usually a big problem for you. You are, in essence, a ghost employee whose individual contribution is likely not to be noted or appreciated. Your check doesn’t depend on being right at every turn, just on the important stuff. But your integrity prevents you from turning in work with known errors or flaws.
When I ran my own tech writing firm years ago, I found that if we introduced an obvious error or two early in a draft document submitted to a client, they’d see that mistake, catch it, fix or flag it, and then feel like they’d done their “review” job. (Sometimes, but not often, they’d get upset. More often, they’d be a bit smug in pointing out the mistake.) That meant they gave the rest of the document less painstaking attention. I know; it seems counter-intuitive, right? But it worked almost every time.
Now, I’m not advocating that, as a strategy, you turn in work with flaws that affect the overall quality of advice or workmanship. This was just an example of one way I tried of dealing with the situation.
What I am suggesting, however, is that there’s a big difference between “best effort” and “perfect”. If you spend too much time carrying out the last 1% or 5% or 10% of the polish you see a project could use, you may be working counter-productively. The client may feel forced to find and request or order detrimental changes just to put his or her imprimatur on the project, which could in turn diminish the quality. Then, too, if you bill for that additional perfecting time, you may end up losing out on some contracts because you’re too expensive.
This is one of those “soft ideas” that you have to have a bit of a feel for executing. There are some narrow ropes to walk here.
