Resources aren’t infinite. We probably all wish they were (who wouldn’t want a bottomless bank account or endless sunny day?) but sadly that’s not how our reality worked out.
This counts for everything:
- How much money you can spend on something
- How much time you can allocate to it
- The energy you use trying to accomplish it
- The focus you need in order to use that energy on the right thing
- The amount of total bandwidth you have for all your current and future demands
Many creatives—engineers, artists, writers, etc—would love to keep poking at something until it’s absolutely perfect, or at least near-perfect. Until they’re happy with it. Until it ekes out that last bit of efficiency, or complexity, or aesthetic pleasure.
But sadly, we just can’t. We’ve got other interests, and other things to do that actually generate income.
So we have to be smart about how we use our finite resources.
We need to compare the level of our effort versus the level of impact our effort will give us.
I come across this a lot in engineering, often accompanied by the charming phrase “see if the juice is worth the squeeze.” It’s about evaluating if the resources you’d put into trying to further optimize a design, or calculate a more accurate answer, is actually worth the end result.
Say you’re trying to design a wing for a high-altitude, long-endurance aircraft. If you’re Skunk Works designing the U-2, you’re probably willing to pour a few hundred thousand (or million) dollars, and countless engineer hours, into getting a 2% higher lift over drag. But you have the funds, the people, and the mission that makes this worth doing.
But if you’re a single engineer, designing a similar wing for a small, cheap UAV? Getting 2% better efficiency is probably not worth your time and energy, especially if there are other things you could be working on. This is doubly important if you’re one of only a handful of engineers on the project in total.
Have you heard of the Pareto Principle? It’s the observation that 80% of the results from something come from 20% of your efforts.
I’d argue that what I’m talking about here is a related concept: you need to balance your inputs against the actual outputs.
Is the extra 2% efficiency worth it if you’re spending 60% of your available effort to get it? Or would you rather spend that time, energy, and brainpower on activities that make a much greater impact?
The choice is yours.