Do The Minimum

A recent Top Tip was about avoiding tautologies. I realised later that most of the email was spent noticing and highlighting them but oddly I didn’t offer any ways to deal with them.

I didn’t mean not to and should have followed up with a couple of ways to remove them. Normally, whatever the theme is there’s a suggested action to take to solve the problem or utilise the idea. I’ll highlight a couple of examples of how I’ve seen it done or perhaps even done it myself. Then I’ll suggest a few ways you might be able to use it too. 

Last time I didn’t really share any ways of actually achieving this. That was a bit remiss of me. Let’s sort that out today by discussing the MED.

You might have heard about the MED - the Minimum Effective Dose. It’s an idea from the world of pharmacology but it fits nicely with the concept of cutting out tautologies.

Mr Pharmacist

Before a new medicine can be officially licensed there are number of trials it has to undergo. Usually there are a number of phases of clinical trials during a drug development lifecycle:

Phase 1 assessing the safety of a drug where a company will often find a maximum tolerated dose (MTD).

Phase 2 seeks to establish the best dosage to have the desired effect. Ideally they’re looking for the minimum effective dose; the smallest dose that will produce the desired outcome. And that’s the bit we’re interested in.

The MED is the smallest amount of a drug required to produce the desired response for patients.

I Need Water

Going beyond the MED is a waste of time, effort and money. It could even be dangerous. There’s no benefit in dosing any more than the MED.

The concept is useful beyond medicine. Think about boiling the kettle for a cuppa. In order for water to boil your kettle needs to heat it to 100°C. Unless you live in Al Paz that’s the temperature you need to ensure the water boils and you can enjoy a decent cup of tea.

Lower than 100°C and the water won’t boil. So 100°C is the MED. 

But here’s the important thing, there’s no point in increasing the temperature any further. At 100°C the water will boil. Ratcheting things up to 120°C won’t make it boil any better. Boiled is boiled. And that’s good enough.

Push It

Body builders use the MED concept to establish the right amount of working out required for the biggest gains with the least effort. What is the right number of lifts at the right weight? 

If they go over that there will be no further gains. There will be unnecessary energy expended and they may actually cause damage, delaying any gains.

In a work context I usually think of the MED as recognising and sticking to what’s ‘good enough’. 

Avoiding perfectionism and settling for ‘good enough’ is a brilliant way of getting things done. In most situations it’s much better to have ten things done to the standard of good enough, rather than one thing done exquisitely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, if you’re working on a Fabergé egg you can tell me I’m wrong. I accept that in some circumstances nothing but the best will suffice.

But unless that’s you then I suggest that good enough is good enough ninety nine times out of a hundred. And I don’t recall Mr Fabergé ever signing up for my Top Tips email or visiting the blog.

Too Much Of Anything

The MED can be a handy metaphor for helping you work more effectively. Cut out those tautologies by choosing to do less. Just do the amount that’s required and no more.

Use the MED as a shorthand to remind yourself to get things done, up to a level just under where you’d be delighted - and then quickly move on to the next thing.

It sounds counter intuitive to not do your very best, I know, but it works. Accumulative progress in a large number of areas far outweighs brilliance in one or two.

Yes, yes, yes, Mr Fabergé, I hear you and no, you’re quite right to argue with me. But this isn’t about you remember! Let it go.

Nobody Does It Better

When I'm working with schools I sometimes get teachers to ask themselves a stock question:

“Does it need laminating?”

Ninety nine per cent of the time the answer is no. Step away from the laminating machine!

As well as helping to identify and excise tautologies MED fits well with the idea of having ‘an average day’, where you do something small that moves you in the right direction every day. Nothing groundbreaking but just something to take you a step further.

Doing small things repeatedly over time can have profound results. Running water won’t make much of an impression over rock in one day. Give it five million or so years and it’s a very different story. Look at the Grand Canyon.

If you do just the MED you’ll most likely be doing enough. And it might be quite possible that you’ll be able to reclaim small pockets of time that you can use for other things. 

You might even find huge swathes of time, in fact, that you can retrieve and put to purpose elsewhere.

So this weekend take a moment and reflect on where you might be able to do less and achieve just as much using the Minimum Effective Dose.

Have an average weekend!