Work perfect — a commentary

Our world has too many imperfections that have stacked up

Facebook has/had these quotes on their office walls which became popular a few years ago:

“Done is better than perfect.”

“Move fast and break things”

Quotes on the walls of one of Facebook’s offices

These two quotes seem to have good internal consistency. Move fast, break things — meaning the thing you built isn’t perfect. But is that really good? I used to operate with a similar philosophy as well. However, I’ve learnt, and have started enjoying slower, more perfect or more complete work.

Perfect work simply means being thorough with your work. Doing multiple checks, being thorough and being sure. If you had to give a second pass at it, there should be no glaring problems with your work.

When we set out to work on a skilled task — whether that is programming or design, there are deadlines on delivery. Most times in my experience, we’re always crunched for time. We always deliver a “good” result. Good might have some holes. Good might not be good enough sometimes. Here are some reasons why.

Negative Impacts

You can only see and plan ahead so much when you’re contributing work. The downstream effects might not be immediately obvious. To take some extreme examples, if a cybersecurity expert stops at “good” on a critical project, there might be holes that leads to devastating impacts, like identity theft. If a govt project to build roads / bridges are just “ok”, or “good”, people may lose lives or lose a lot of time.

Will performing “perfect work” eliminate such problems? It will for sure eliminate the most obvious problems. Downstream effects cannot be fully predicted but can be reduced. Sloppy work tends to “stack up” creating problems later on.

A simpler eg: Let’s say a local govt office needs to update somebody’s property records with valid permits. The paperwork has been filed, but somewhere in the chain of command, somebody missed some crucial paperwork. Now it’s at a final state, but is sent back because of the missing documents. This would waste the time of these govt officials, and maybe cause financial or other wastage to the property owner.

Satisfaction

There is a certain sense of satisfaction when you do something really well, that is just missing when things are just good enough.

For eg: When a govt office clerk arranges and schedules all incoming paperwork and everything moves on time. Or when a developer has checked and rechecked their code, and also added adequate documentation.

When you look back at this you might wonder — “I did this, this is great”.

It also immediately elevates you to another level among all the others who don’t do this enough.

Delight

This is delight on the part of anyone who is on the receiving end of your work. Whether it’s a customer, your app’s user, or your manager. That extra bit of care and craft will make somebody else’s day a bit better, a bit more delightful.

I love good roads (who doesn’t), but let’s see the difference between “done” and “perfect” roads below:

Left: a road that was just “done” at some point. Right: a “perfect” road. How do you feel about each of them?

Work patiently.

Work perfect.

Spread delight.