Priority Dilution: Don’t sabotage yourself!

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!