Matters Of Less Importance

(Originally published on Medium.com in December 2022)

Many people pride themselves on consistently hard work and striving for excellence in all things. For these people, the following line may resonate:

If the job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

You might have even heard that line before. Perhaps many times. It’s attributed to Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, in 1746. It captures the ethic that whatever activity (or ‘job’) we turn towards, we should, by definition, undertake it to a high standard. It’s a seemingly virtuous position. But it’s also a bit misleading.

Not everything we do carries equal importance — that’s obvious. In fact, you could probably argue that most of what we do carries relatively little importance in the grand arc of our lives. Only a small minority of all the things we do are really, genuinely, important. So committing an equal effort to every undertaking seems like a mis-appropriation of our limited time, attention, and energy. To be fair, the Earl didn’t say we should treat all the things we do as if they’re of completely equal importance. However, he did suggest that everything we do, we should do well — if we’re going to do it at all. And that’s still a problem.

What does it mean to do something “well”? On a loosely-defined spectrum of doing things badly, averagely, and exceptionally, doing something “well” sits somewhere between doing it averagely and exceptionally. Doing something “well” means doing it better than average (but not quite as good as doing it exceptionally). Given the Earl tells us to treat every job that’s “worth doing” in that manner, this effectively means treating every job better than how we treat the average job. That seems, well, nonsensical.

But this exploration raises a more fundamental question. How much time, attention, and effort should we put into the things we do? One way to frame this is to contrast the two extremes of perfectionism and indifference. When we’re in the grip of perfectionism, we focus so intensely on getting every single detail absolutely perfectly ‘right’ that this can inhibit us from making progress at all. Perfectionism on any one task can disproportionately negatively impact our other tasks by consuming an inordinate amount of our limited resources.

Striving for perfection can jeopardise not just the thing we’re seemingly trying to do perfectly, but can also undermine the wider project that it’s a part of. Moreover, perfectionism doesn’t refer to seeking excellence and maintaining high standards. Perfectionism is, at its heart, an inability to move forward despite having already done what’s required. Besides, nothing’s ever perfect, so it’s an impossible goal anyway. The perfectionist is always at risk of falling into a rabbit hole of idealised excellence, and struggling to claw their way out the longer they’re down there.

At the other extreme is indifference, where we disengage from what we’re doing and express a kind of passivity towards it. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig refers to the “spectator attitude” of people who remain perpetually disconnected from the things they’re doing. For such people, “caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.”

People with this spectator attitude often desire to just get the damn thing
done, as quickly as possible. From a productivity perspective, this striving to ‘get things done’ has its merits. But Pirsig is referring to people who rush through what they’re doing with little care and attention, where the overriding motivation is the end state of simply having done the thing: “When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.” This can result in doing the right thing, but not necessarily doing the thing right. In consequence, we end up having to go back and do the thing properly — the way it should have been done the first time.

Part of the solution, it seems, is a conscious decision to apply commensurate effort. That is, the effort we assign to doing something should be commensurate with the actual importance of the thing. This means that things worth doing are not, in fact, always worth doing well. There are always so many things we could be doing. Yet many of these will be relatively unimportant, and therefore warrant a lower level of effort. These are the things where we mostly just want to reach the end state of having done them. These things may still be worth doing — but they’re just worth doing, rather than worth doing well.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations:

Above all, review in your mind those you have seen yourself in empty struggles, refusing to act in accord with their own natural constitution, to hold tight to it and to find it sufficient. And in this context you must remember that there is proportionate value in our attention to each action — so you will not lose heart if you devote no more time than they warrant to matters of less importance.

The reality is that many of the things we do are not highly important. This doesn’t mean we should stop doing them, just that they shouldn’t command too much of our limited resources. The number of things that are really important, and therefore worth doing well, is far smaller — and the number of things that are worth doing exceptionally well is smaller still. In today’s information-saturated environment, the ability to consciously direct our limited time, attention and energy towards what’s essential — those things that matter most — is invaluable.

The challenge, of course, is figuring out what they are.