Priority dilution causes you to sabotage your own work and goals by focusing on less important tasks instead of keeping your full attention to all parts of the actual assignment. Surprisingly, overachievers are affected in particular and often have difficulties performing group work or team projects.
In grad school one of my fellow class mates called me out during a team meeting, yelling at me: “Dude, stop being such a perfectionist and submit the damn paper, we already past the deadline for the team project”. In fact we already finished the paper two days ago, but I spend the whole day making adjustments.
I do believe that actually a lot of people in business/finance are affected by this phenomenon and suffer from consequences. Being an absolute perfectionist it sometimes becomes compulsive when you sit in front of a spread sheet for hours thinking about improvements nobody would actually recognize while you pass the deadline and forget “the big picture”
When you constantly demand either academic or professional excellence from yourself, you tend to take matters too far and get stuck in a situation you won’t feel comfortable with. In the project mentioned above we were supposed to conduct a company valuation, including industry and strategy analysis. Since I am a finance geek, I immediately dived into the valuation part and tried different metrics and different input parameters for my comparable analysis.
Since we had to evaluate an internet company that monetizes clicks on their website, I tried to come up with some fancy multiples such as click per firm value or amount of clicks adjusted for churn rate per firm value and so on. It was fun playing around with the data but at the end I realized that we haven’t even started our industry analysis and that the target wouldn’t even fit into the overall strategy of the acquirer for several reasons.
What lessons can be learned? Especially perfectionist can be very biased towards the priority or importance of vital parts during a team project because they tend to focus on parts of the assessment they are most interested in and were they are most likely about to outperform their fellow students/colleagues.
In order to account for every part of a project properly, you have to force yourself to make it “quick and dirty”. Move on to the next issue as soon as possible in order to devote an equal amount of time to every part of your assignment. I know this is against your instincts and hurts you inside but according to my experience this will definitely improve your results.
I would highly appreciate statements from my fellow monkeys that suffered from priority dilution in their past! Don't hesitate and tell us how you sabotaged yourself!
Great post, keeping things simple is definitely something I wrestle with. When I just DO, I get results. When I try and make things perfect, I just don't make the same gains. It's counterintuitive, and in many cases just doing SOMETHING is better than waiting around for everything to be ideal. KISS - Keep it simple, stupid!
I actually think investment banking helps with this a lot. While presentation quality need to be perfect, the name of the game seems much more based on quick, simple, and yet effective analysis. Things may not always be as theoretically correct as possible (especially on complicated accounting issues), but they are good enough to get the job done.
^The above is a concept I wish our newly minted associates were perceptive enough to grasp... had one recently that was convinced we had to take into account percentage of completions method in a model...
If you keep track of your workflow somewhere, seperating to dos into a need to have and nice to have column is great. I agree that this is why everyone gets very frustrated with bschool associates who got their work experience in much slower moving organizations (and loves any sort of military).
This doesn't really read like it was written by a perfectionist.
Libero quis voluptas facilis deleniti ab tempore. Asperiores autem earum officiis. Ex et vel esse qui ut minima ut. Et itaque odit quos impedit omnis.
Ut iure magni accusantium ex provident dolore illo. Quia laborum sunt eum numquam et repudiandae adipisci. Voluptatibus qui culpa ipsam est necessitatibus. Quod accusantium enim consequatur odit odio necessitatibus blanditiis qui. Dolores sint vitae ab explicabo omnis exercitationem fugit. Dolor reiciendis harum voluptatum ratione. Nulla dolor sunt quod aut consequatur qui culpa.
Quia rerum molestiae veniam. Vitae voluptatibus aut enim ab non id. Non voluptatem maiores culpa dolorum vitae. Ut unde iure velit qui eos fugiat ea. Voluptatem amet praesentium saepe eos ea. Et velit et ipsam consequuntur fuga fugit aliquid.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...