80%

My biggest creative obstacle has been the pursuit of completeness, or the ideal result. It’s not so much perfect versus done, but versus enough. I can recognise a done state; the problem lies in my approach.

I’ve always designed or planned for complete, and that’s often worked in my favour. I’ve also learned that this approach limited both my output and enjoyment. What seems to work better is planning for enough, which I like to express as eighty percent.

This isn’t the Pareto principle. Trying to find the particular 20% of causes that’ll produce 80% of the outcome might indeed be valuable, but I think it’s probably more often impractical, and can become a form of procrastination.

Rather, I’m finding it motivating and liberating to plan for eighty percent of the ideal, to reach a minimum viable level of done. And to be clear, that’s not planning eighty with a view to a hundred; it’s planning for the 80% solution which will then be accepted as done.

In my case, this might mean writing shorter books, or allowing a book to develop organically instead of hitting every point on a detailed plan. It might also mean taking a more pragmatic and less intellectual approach to tasks like building automations for personal use, or the design and architecture of this site’s sections and functionality, and so on.

I think it can probably be applied to almost anything, especially since it’s a heuristic rather than algorithmic approach. Start with the intention of getting the 80% result, do that, then call it done and start the next thing.

If you face obstacles like motivation paralysis, scope creep, or corrosive perfectionism (which are all probably the same thing), then perhaps it might be of use to you too.