Extra, in some cases, is good.  Extra guac? Please.  Extra time to sleep in? Sure.  Unfortunately on a project, extra can be bad.  At best adding extra to things distorts our view of the request and makes it easy to lose sight of what is actually needed.  At worst it totally derails a project and diminishes its value to your customer.

Adding extra into our work does several things… some obvious, others much less so.  I find that instead of making things better or providing a better output, these additions detract from my deliverable.  Here’s several ways how:

Working on extra stuff that is “better” than our objective distracts us from what we should be doing.   We can tell ourselves we’re helping, or that we can make up the time, or that the actual request is easy to do, we’re just making it harder to complete our objective.  At best we end up putting less energy into our objective, which results in risk that we missed something important, or that the product isn’t as strong as it could be.

Working on extra necessarily pulls our focus away from what we should be doing.  Instead of critically examining our request for potential flaws, we’re day-dreaming about something unrelated.  This split focus allows us to make mistakes we otherwise would catch.  Even worse, this can result in less time to figure out the “extra” we thought was so valuable… so instead of delivering what was asked we deliver one thing that was asked that may or may not work, and another thing that wasn’t asked for of questionable use.

Working isn’t done in a vacuum, and we as individuals (and sometimes teams) can’t know everything.  When we make a choice to add extra to a request we’re gambling that we know what’s “best” or “right”.  While we might get lucky and deliver something that is, in fact, useful or valuable, what happens if we’re wrong?  Suddenly we have to explain why we wasted time NOT working on what someone wanted to build something that’s useless.

I find it fascinating how hard it is to only do what is asked, and nothing more.  It should be an incredibly easy thing to do, but the allure of making it “better” is very hard to resist.  As funny as is it to say, it takes discipline to stay inside the lines.  It is true there will be times when we can push on those lines, and sometimes help redraw them, we need to be very careful not to wander outside them.  Doing so distracts us from our objective, and instead of building us up, only tears us down.