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It's Good Enough

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I love to watch someone doing stuff on computers. Partly this is because I am able to learn new things. Partly this is because I love to help people getting more efficient. Not because I want to show them how great I am. I do this because of my general aversion to spending time on things that can be done faster or avoiding things that are not worth the time at all. Additionally, I have so much fun when I am able to help people making their (IT) world a bit more enjoyable.

When I do give advice, I sometimes suggest a different tool which I do think might be better for the job. Sometimes I suggest a slightly different method to achieve the same or even a better result.

However, Many times I hear the phrase "it's OK, it's good enough for me" when I try to give advice on personal information management in general. I do think that in many cases, this is just an excuse.

Please do not get me wrong. Settling on something which is "good enough" is actually a very intelligent thing to do. IT-related people have a certain tendency to over-engineer things from a various set of reasons. So self-reflection and settling on stuff that gets the things done good enough is a good thing.

On the other side, I had to learn that people are using this phrase as an excuse. They want to avoid the effort on learning new things, change their habits - which is always very hard to do - or postpone a decision.

So whenever I hear "it's good enough" my internal alarm bell is ringing.

The point I want to make is that using the phrase "it's good enough" is only a valid one as long as you have a good idea of the next step you are going to skip with this decision.

If you do not know, what the next step really means and how doing the next best thing is going to boost your workflow (or not), you are not in the position to know that your current way of doing stuff is really good enough for you!

And: you probably are going miss cool stuff, you are probably going to spend too much of your lifetime on doing non-fun stuff, you are probably doing it just wrong, you are even probably going to make a fool of yourself in a situation where this results in negative consequences.

You don't have to learn this next step all by yourself in order to be able to make the decision. You can rely on someone else who has experience with both, your current workflow and the other one. In case you find even multiple persons who do recommend you to do it differently, they might have a good point and really want to help you.

Please do keep this in mind when you are using the phrase "good enough" for the next time.


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