Everybody knows that perfect is the enemy of good, but it’s one of those tenets that’s easy to say and hard to live by. When you’re working on a creative project, there’s almost always something you wanted to do better, or some little detail that didn’t quite live up to your standards. That can be tough to accept.

This is why thoughtful project scoping and timeboxing is so important: if you don’t have a structured process and an end date for your work, you’ll be more likely to wander out into the perfectionist weeds. The farther out you get, the more time you’ve spent—mostly for diminishing returns.

But even with a structure in place, there’s still another tricky aspect of perfectionism: what perfect means for one project doesn’t necessarily apply in the same way to another. You have to redefine your standards every time.

Here’s an example.

Right now we’re working on some new stuff. It’s in the very early stages, so our level of tolerance for imperfections should be very high. We’re in the figuring-things-out phase, NOT the production-quality product phase.

So what’s the problem?

We’re extremely good at making production-quality software! Maybe a little too good. Our natural temptation is to apply our usual rigorous development practices to the new stuff we’re exploring.

You don’t need so much rigor, early on. You need only the right amount of perfect. What that means depends entirely on your situation.

When you’re inventing something from scratch…

…the right amount of perfect is an ugly sketch with a Sharpie marker. Or some hardly-formed daydreams, haphazardly pecked into a notes app.

When you’re making a prototype of an idea…

…the right amount of perfect is a barely-working demo. Can you show the idea to someone, well enough to demonstrate how it should work—even if it’s stitched together with duct tape and popsicle sticks?

When you’re building something new…

…the right amount of perfect is “basically functional.” You need to use this new thing to learn and keep iterating, so it has to work fundamentally. But it certainly doesn’t have to be polished. It can be clunky. It can have lots of bugs. It can have unfinished parts. At this stage, finishing everything to a high level of perfection is a waste of time, because you might throw out half the work along the way. You need just enough perfect to be able to make judgements and improvements, but no more than that.

Finally, when you’re certain your idea has legs…

…and you’re committing to going for it, that’s when you can swing back around and make it fully considered, polished, and complete. This is the moment for production-quality rigor. Full speed ahead. Get those high standards back in action!

Transitioning between those phases is tumultuous, but it helps to clearly define which phase of a project you’re in, and what the expectations are for what you’re making. (You can do that formally or informally.)

My trick is to repeatedly ask myself, “How fancy does this need to be, for right now?” The answer is usually: NOT SO FANCY. This is a helpful gut check that helps you pull back from overdoing something.

Consider full perfection a luxury you can indulge when you have nothing else more significant to worry about. For most teams, and most projects, that happens exactly 0% of the time. 😅

This was originally posted on Signal vs. Noise.