How can you give 110

I help them to find new and innovative ways to better deliver on their objectives. But is this always the case? Context is therefore key as you are talking about a percentage of something. We all need down-time. After a long day in the office we may decide to take some time to relax. The opposite must also therefore be true. It must also be possible to give more, making an effort that can only be sustained inconsistently and for short periods of time. The reality is that humans are not Skittles.

Human effort, ability and innovation is not a known quantity. It is not fixed and set, rather, it evolves and changes as we change and as we seek out new ways of becoming better. Each and every time we push the boundary of what we perceive to be the limit of our possibilities, a little bit more becomes possible and eventually we realize that the impossible was always possible but it was about the steps we needed to take in order to reach the benchmark and move beyond to a greater objective.

All of our capacities as human beings and business leaders work this way. Our bodies understand this- they evolve and adapt as we push the boundaries. If you go for a run every day, with time you will be able to run further and faster.

Unfortunately, time is a limited resource, which creates an opportunity cost. Opportunity costs are the name economists give to the things you could have been doing with a resource you spent in another way. The time you devote to a particular project could have been spent on countless other things on your to-do list, but you chose to spend them on that project. Every project you do at work needs to be effective, but not every project needs to be perfect.

An email you send to a close colleague at your level of the organization can be a partial sentence with typos in it and it will still elicit the desired response without damaging the relationship.

A note to your boss might need to be written a little more carefully. A presentation to a potential new client had better be polished to a high gloss. That is, the key to success at work is solving what researchers John Payne, James Bettman, and Eric Johnson called the effort-accuracy tradeoff. You have lots of strategies you can use to complete a task at work. Some involve more work and time than others.

The more effortful strategies generally lead to better results than the less effortful strategies. To maximize your productivity, you need to learn which assignments you are given require your best effort, which require a decent effort, and which can be dashed off. Of course, in order to master this effort-accuracy tradeoff, you have to focus some effort on how you resolve that tradeoff. Talk to your colleagues about which projects really require your best self and which ones just need to be completed.

While making mistakes is never comfortable, being able to get more work done in the long-run is worth a few hiccups along the way.

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