Good enough is a rational stopping rule
💎CORE ARGUMENT
The best option is only available to someone with unlimited time to look for it. I am not that person, and neither is any team I have worked in. Searching costs hours, attention and whatever I did not do while comparing. Past some point the next hour of looking costs more than the improvement it can find. Stopping at good enough is not laziness. It is the correct answer to a problem that includes the cost of solving it.
The discipline is in the order of operations. Decide what enough is before looking, then take the first option that clears it. If I set the bar afterwards, I set it wherever the option I already like happens to sit. Or I never set it, and the search becomes the project.
I have the scars. Four notes systems, each abandoned for a better one that was always nearly ready, the fourth at 70 percent. I was optimising a tool with no stated bar for what the tool had to do. This year I set the bar first: can I find a note, and can I write the next one. The vault cleared it on the first day, and every item on the itch list since has been an invitation to resume the search.
It holds on a roadmap as well. A feature is done when it clears the aspiration we set in discovery, not when nobody can think of an improvement, because somebody always can.
Two limits. A bar set too low is just a low bar, and when options keep clearing it easily it should go up. And some work is not a search among options at all. A draft does not improve by being accepted early; there, pushing past fine is how I find out what I think.
🧱BUILT FROM
🌍WHY IT MATTERS
I write the bar before I look: for a tool, a hire, a hotel, a feature. Then the first thing over it wins and I stop reading reviews.
Still open. How do I tell a bar that is rightly low from one I lowered because I was tired? In July I could not, and I am not sure I could now.
☑️NEXT STEPS
- Write the done-bar into each discovery brief before prototyping
- Leave the itch list alone
Aspiration levels as a replacement for optimising, from a paper that takes the limits of the chooser seriously.
The same move with money is 💎 Enough is a number I have to choose. Stopping is what makes 💎 A finished small thing teaches more than an unfinished large one possible.
Search has a cost and returns diminish. A fixed aspiration level, set in advance, converts an open-ended optimisation into a stopping problem: accept the first alternative that meets it. The level adjusts with experience, up when options are plentiful and down when they are scarce.
In writing, good enough is where the thinking stops. 💎 Writing is how I find out whether I understand depends on going past the first acceptable sentence to the one that is actually true.
An issue about scope, and the value I added in April.