With only a few exceptions I maintain that the old adage “Any job worth doing is worth doing right” is very, very wrong.   In fact I think that silly mindset is followed by only a handful of people though many would suggest they follow it regularly.

For many jobs the overwhelming benefits of the task are attained after 80% is completed, and there is a huge diminishing return as you approach the “100% completed” part of the job.    Exception for medical stuff like “appendectomy”?  Heck no, in fact those are the areas where we should work much harder to absorb more risk so we can decrease costs and get better basic medical care to the inner city and underdeveloped countries.    In the case of medical care I think we often come close to a 100% standard and it’s absurd.  For example using expensive throwaway gowns and other disposal items one time to (slightly) minimize the risks of infection.

This summer I’ve done a lot of painting.   House painting.   I’ve done a pretty good job of scraping and prep work, but wondered if I was working too hard at it.   Obviously you can’t get every little bit of paint off, so the question becomes how far do you go with it?  99.9%, 90%, 80%, 50% 0%?

I’ve been especially intrigued by how the quality of the prep I did ten years ago does not seem to bear much on how well the paint’s held up.  Rather, the paint has failed where the weather conditions were very hard on the house -especially where sun and rain hit hard.   In fact yesterday I found an area on the back shed, largely protected from sun and rain, where the paint, after TEN YEARS, was still nicely coating a piece of moss.   I’d done inferior prep on the outside sheds compared to the house, but the paint on the sheds had held up about as well.   So the extra prep on the house was probably a waste of time.

Of course it’s hard to break the mindset, so I think I did about a 95% quality scraping job this time.  Hopefully in 2016 or so, when it’s time to paint again, I’ll remember the 80% rule.