Tip: Satisficing is Good Enough

It’s Monday morning and it’s time for your perfectly nutritious, balanced, tasty breakfast. You prepare the farm-fresh free-range eggs to perfection, slice the imported ham, whisk up the Bearnaise sauce, choose the most mouth-watering strawberries, grind the coffee beans and put them in the cold-press maker…well, actually, you grab a half-stale bagel off your kitchen counter and stop at the drive-through for some coffee that’s been on the burner for 45 minutes.

Congratulations, you’ve just engaged in satisficing behavior. Coined by social scientist Herbert Simon in 1956, satisficing (a combination of “satisfy” and “suffice”) refers to the typical human behavior of choosing alternatives that are “good enough” rather than perfect. In many cases, people don’t choose the single best answer to a problem, because they’re operating with imperfect information, time constraints, or limited brainpower. Rather than bemoaning this state of affairs, though, I’d like to give you permission to embrace your inner satisficer.

Reading resources like Web Worker Daily can be daunting. We’re constantly covering things like the best practices for home-based web workers, the best Web 2.0 software, or the best practices for the self-employed. We tell you how to optimize your time, your task list, and your e-mail client. And we’re not the only ones; there are other fine blogs out there clamoring for your attention with their own tips on leading the optimally organized life. Faced with this continuous onslaught of perfection, it’s easy to end up feeling inadequate.

Here’s a little secret: we’re not perfect either. Nobody on the WWD staff has the ideal system set up, and we’re all experimenting to find better ways of doing things, just like you. One of the big keys to really getting things done is that you don’t have to be perfect either. Don’t despair of yourself if you can’t do everything to the standards of those folks who seem to have all of life organized.

Satisficing is simple to put into practice. Just ask yourself, when faced with a daunting task, one simple question: what would be a satisfactory outcome? Not the best possible outcome, not the optimum outcome, not the perfect outcome – but one that’s good enough for all concerned.  In large part this is just a matter of holding yourself to reachable standards instead of unrealistically high ones. That’s not to say that you should deliberately do bad work; quite the contrary. If you focus on satisficing, you can move happily through your day, finishing things and tackling others, knowing that each task has met the quality bar that you’ve set for yourself.

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