Quantity Over Quality Will Lead To Success

Here are five reasons why:

1. The more you do of something, the better you will get at it;
2. The more you do in a shorter timeframe, the more mistakes you will make, and the more you will learn (not just about that task, but in general: sometimes the lessons you learn can be surprising and the only way you will experience them is through taking action);
3. The shorter the timeframe, the smaller the impact of mistakes;
4. The faster you get things out of the door, the sooner you will receive feedback on how you can make it better and the more time you will have to build those changes in;
5. The sooner you have something tangible, the easier it is to understand, to communicate what you are trying to achieve and to realise the benefits of the work. This principle is echoed in various agile development methodologies.

Being a perfectionist is useful up to a point, but if you keep holding things off until they are "perfect", there is a risk that you will never finish - and it's better to get something out there in a "nearly good enough" state than to never finish at all.

It's not all black-and-white thought: quality is still important, and whatever you do, it is important to strive for the highest quality possible, but not at the expense of getting things done.

For example, a lot has been written on the power of the pareto principle, or 80/20 "rule" (Tim Ferris is one advocate, for example) - and it is true that setting a timeframe to do something in, and just making sure you get as much done within that timeframe as possible, but not doing any more, is one great way to drive productivity and the time contraint can actually sometimes increase the quality of the outcome because the urgency can drive increased levels of creativity.

Project Managers will be very familiar with the good-fast-cheap triangle, and regularly need to make decisions about whether to spend more time on something to increase quality, especially when there's an impending deadline. It's a balance we all need to strike in everything we do.

This post is an example: I actually currenly have 12 work-in-progress articles, ranging from headline ideas and structures to drafts that I'm not quite happy with - but I'm also keen to ensure I keep publishing content on a regular basis, partly to keep the activity going on the site, partly to give myself a feeling of progress and achievement, partly to keep in the flow and learn through action. It may not be the most polished of articles, but I hope you find it useful and it's an example of how I am working to practice what I preach.

So the key message is: get started now! The sooner you get going, the more you can do, the better you will get, and the further you will go...