Underdo It
Real and Imaginary Value
My partner and I recently had to have a talk about overdoing things. About me overdoing things, that is. This conversation was in regards to our holiday cards, which were overwhelming me to such a degree that they did not get sent till late last week. Historically, I’ve handwritten notes in the cards I send. Every year there are more and more addresses on the list. This year, between work stuff and other stuff I just didn’t get around to it and I was like, “Oh well I guess we just don’t send holiday cards this year.” Then my partner was like, “Or—now hear me out—we could just put these in the envelopes that are already printed, and put them in the mail, and be done, and you don’t have to handwrite anything.” And I was like, “What?! That’s crazy talk.”
At work, I’m pretty good at identifying places where I, or anyone else, could be doing less. I’m literally the work process improvement person at my job because people tell me about a work process and I interrupt and say “that’s stupid, you should stop doing that” or “there’s an application that can do that automatically so you don’t have to” and then the people say, predictably, “What!? That’s crazy talk.” But then they improve the process.
I just don’t do it very well in my personal life. I told my partner we aren’t going to throw anymore parties, not ever again, because doing so is too much work, and then my parter, always the voice of reason, said, “What if we threw a party but we only did half of the stuff we usually do for it?” And after I got over my knee-jerk “that’s impossible” reaction, I realized it was not only possible but probably no one but me would ever notice.
So in the spirit of not overwhelming ourselves, today’s post-holiday Shelf Life is about some ways to stop overdoing things and underdo things instead.
To underdo something can mean to do less than you can, or to do less than what's required. I’m not suggesting, herein, that anyone should do less than the minimum required. I mean, sometimes it’s fine and sometimes it’s not. Underdone steak: Fine. Underdone chicken: Way less fine. So let’s focus on ways to underdo things by:
Recognizing when we’re overdoing something.
Identifying the minimum viable product (or process) that we can deliver.
Distinguishing real value from imaginary value.
I’m going to start at the end because I’m contrary like that.
Imaginary value is a term I learned from some guy several jobs ago. When people work—like anyone, any person, does a job or activity or creates something—they add value to whatever it is they’re doing or creating. If you’re a house painter, you add value to a house by painting it. If you’re an editor, you add value to a text by editing it. If you’re a tailor, you add value to a garment by tailoring it. And so on.
People with specialized job knowledge—like the painter, the editor, and the tailor in the examples above—can recognize value in their specialty area better than a layperson who does not have that specialized job knowledge. For instance, as an editor, I recognize all kinds of mistakes in page composition that most people would never notice. Italicized comma that shouldn’t be italicized, widows, orphans, hyphen stacks, rivers. I’m trained to notice these things so I notice them. Most readers are not.
At some point in editing or proofreading a book, as I continue to refine and perfect the text, I stop adding real value through my work and begin adding imaginary or invisible value—meaning, after I cross the value threshold, I am now adding value only in my own mind, or value that only I can see. I am no longer improving the text to a degree that the end user (the reader) will notice—I’m only improving it in a way that I (or maybe another editor) could notice.
A professional painter can surely recognize the difference between a great paint job and a perfect one, but the homeowner probably cannot. A professional tailor can recognize the difference between a well-fitting garment and an exquisitely fitting garment, but your bog-standard clothing-wearer off the street can’t see or feel or appreciate the difference.
When it comes to underdoing something in the sense of doing less than the best of your abilities, that can simply mean stopping at the end of adding real value and declining to go on adding imaginary value. This makes perfect sense to people when you explain it to them like this: I don’t want you to use your time adding value that will never be noticed or appreciated.
However, in my experience, it can be painful for a perfectionist to hear that their level of effort is not appreciated. While they might agree with you that there’s no reason to improve a product or service past the point where the end user will notice, if you tell them that something they are doing is adding imaginary value and they should stop doing that thing, then they get upset with you or with the situation.
Knowing this—that is, knowing I resist being told by anyone else that I’m breaking my neck for no reason, I try to proactively notice when I might be overdoing it—when I may be in a situation where I’ve stopped adding real value to something and I’m only continuing to work on it to appease my own inner perfectionist. This brings me to the first bullet from the above list: How to recognize when I’m overdoing something.
If I’m plugging along at a task or project and I suddenly find myself irritated, frustrated, overwhelmed/hopeless, or avoidant—those are all signs I might be overdoing it. I actually think this is my brain’s way of trying to bring my attention to the fact that I’m making something too complicated or labor-intensive.
I mean, sometimes a task or project just is complicated or labor-intensive—not because I’m going all perfectionist on it but just by its nature. The trick, for me, is being able to tell whether I’m doing more than I need to.
My partner introduced me to a great term from software development, which is minimum viable product. A minimum viable product is a version of a product (or, for our purposes, service or process) that has just enough features to launch—so that users can begin working with it and providing their feedback and suggestions for future feature development.
In the case of not software development, I’m thinking of the minimum viable product as the bare minimum deliverable you can turn in and get full credit, or the bare minimum process that will work and get the job done. For instance—and I’m grabbing this from my recent, real experience—you’ve been asked to modify an existing workflow that ships work to a vendor. Currently, a staff member fill a form and upload a file and the work order is generated automatically and sent off to the vendor along with the files. Suddenly, there are three vendors doing the same work and the workflow must be modified so projects are distributed equally among the vendors.
I spent a long and frustrating afternoon trying to figure out a way to have the automated system share projects equally before I realized I could just add a field for the staff member to indicate which vendor any given project should go to. They can divvy projects up however they want.
While I would love to get back to that at some point and find a way for the system to automatically divide the work evenly among three vendors, that feature was not required to launch. The requirement was that the workflow, as it existed, be modified to accommodate additional vendors.
Likewise, in the case of the now-quite-late holiday cards, the requirement—the minimum viable product—was a card, inside an envelope, with a stamp on it, given to the custody of the post office. Handwriting a note, decorating the envelope, coming up with creative inserts, drawing pictures on the cards—none of that is necessary. And although I hate to admit it, writing a handwritten note to each recipient is probably an invisible or imaginary value. I like to think that each recipient would be psyched to receive a personal note but then I asked myself—self, you’ve received probably twenty holiday cards this year—can you remember which ones, specifically, had a personal handwritten note inside and which ones didn’t?
I cannot. I remember some of the personal notes specifically, but I don’t actually remember who didn’t write a personal note. I definitely did not feel a rush of sorrow or anger upon opening a card that didn’t have a handwritten note in it. I certainly did not judge the sender for neglecting to add a personal note.
Since I judged not, hopefully I will not be judged.
There’s nothing wrong with delivering a minimum viable product sometimes—especially when you’re busy, tired, or overwhelmed. Remember, there’s very little that can’t be fixed in revision.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.