After writing about the habit of stopping at 80 percent, several people said to me, “But sometimes we go too far the other way.”
They’re right.
There is another quiet habit in the workplace, and it is just as risky. Spending too much time perfecting things that do not require perfection.
In project management, this is called gold plating. It means adding extra features, polish, or effort that was never requested, never required, and rarely noticed. It feels like excellence. It often looks like dedication. But it is actually inefficiency disguised as high standards.
Administrative professionals are particularly vulnerable to it.
When my niece was getting married, my sister-in-law spent countless hours creating beautiful things that, in my opinion, were not worth the time or money. For the place settings, she hand-dried dozens of flowers. She then, painstakingly, glued them all to beautifully handcrafted name tents. Naturally, she then did the calligraphy on each one of them. Gorgeous, and I did notice, but honestly, because I said to myself, ‘That is way too much work for a name tent!”
I asked her how long each took, and it was about 30 minutes. You do the math, as there were about 80 guests at the wedding. If we were to survey each guest, do you think anyone would remember the name tent? Do you think the bride remembered it?
Rachel created beauty for her daughter’s wedding, and I loved it. But it was a perfect example of gold plating. The good news was that she wasn’t using office time to do this, so we didn’t need to calculate the labor costs of creating them, but many of us are gold plating at work, and it does cost money!
Why did Rachel do this for her daughter? Why do we spend extra, potentially unnecessary hours on things to ensure perfection? Because we care. We take pride in our work. We want things to be right. And when expectations are unclear, we often fill the gap with effort.
But effort is not the same as value.
Let me give you a simple office example.
You are asked to prepare meeting notes. The request is for key decisions and next steps. Instead, you spend extra time rewriting comments for clarity, formatting the document beautifully, adding context, and polishing language that no one asked for.
The result is a flawless document that took twice as long as it needed to.
Did you do excellent work? Yes.
Did you deliver what was required? Yes.
Did the extra effort create additional value? Probably not.
That is gold plating.
According to the Project Management Institute, gold plating is one of the most common causes of schedule overruns and resource waste, because it introduces work that was never part of the original scope (PMI, PMBOK Guide). The intention is positive. The outcome is not.
In EA work, gold plating often shows up in subtle ways.
- You overprepare briefing notes when a high-level summary would have been sufficient.
- You perfect internal documents that will never leave the team.
- You anticipate every possible question, even though only one or two were likely.
- You spend excessive time formatting when clarity was the real requirement.
- Your document is perfect, but your workload is keeping you up at night, wondering how you will get it all done.
The danger is that gold plating makes us feel responsible and thorough. Cutting corners feels careless. Which means that some of us default to “more.”
Researchers studying productivity have found that perfectionism can significantly reduce efficiency and increase burnout without improving outcomes. A study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that excessive attention to detail on low-impact tasks correlates with higher stress and lower overall performance ratings, not the opposite.
In other words, where you invest your precision matters more than how much precision you bring.
So how do you know when 100 percent has crossed into waste?
Here are some strong indicators.
- You are polishing before clarity exists.
If you are perfecting something before the purpose is fully defined, you are likely gold-plating. This often happens with drafts that should still be rough or exploratory.
- You are adding value that no one asked for.
This one is uncomfortable. If the extra effort would be difficult to explain in terms of impact, it may not be needed. Excellence that cannot be articulated is often just habit.
- You are optimizing something that will never be reused.
Spending extra time refining a one-off document or process rarely pays off. Reusable work deserves refinement. Disposable work deserves sufficiency.
- You are doing it to avoid discomfort.
Sometimes we overwork tasks because it feels safer than asking questions, pushing back, or clarifying expectations. Gold plating can be a form of risk avoidance.
What do you need to do? You need to match effort to purpose.
Before investing the extra 20 percent, ask yourself a simple question: “What problem does this extra work solve?”
If the answer is vague or emotional rather than practical, stop doing it.
We also need to recognize that over-delivery can quietly reset expectations. If you always deliver more than required, more becomes the new minimum. Over time, this erodes capacity and increases pressure without increasing appreciation.
That is not excellence. That is unsustainable.
Try this practical reset.
For each task, identify what “done” actually means. Not what perfect looks like. What done looks like.
Then ask: “What would be lost if I stopped here?”
If the answer is “nothing meaningful,” you are likely done.
Excellence is not about always delivering 100 percent. It is about delivering the right 100 percent to the right things.
Just like stopping at 80 percent out of habit is risky, so is pushing to 100 percent when it adds no value.
Both are failures of decision-making.
The real skill for you is not effort. It is judgment.
And when you master that, you stop wasting time polishing what doesn’t matter and start investing energy where it truly does.
That is not lowering standards. That is raising them.