After I shared the story about the boot tray (link here), many of you told me the part that stuck with you was not the boots. It was the realization that most of us are not consciously choosing 80 percent. We are defaulting to it.
That is where this conversation gets interesting.
Strong administrative professionals do not aim for 100 percent all the time. That would be unrealistic and exhausting. The real skill is knowing when 100 percent is required and when 80 percent is a smart, intentional, and efficient choice.
The problem is that many people never make that distinction. They operate on habit instead of judgment.
Let’s talk about how to tell the difference.
First, understand this. In high-trust roles, completion matters more than effort.
Research from Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety and dependability were the two strongest predictors of high-performing teams. Dependability was defined as “getting things done on time and meeting expectations consistently” (Google re:Work, 2015).
Not brilliance. Not creativity. Reliability.
For EAs, dependability often lives in the last 20 percent. The follow-up. The alignment. The check. The confirmation.
So how do you decide when 100 percent is required vs delivering good enough at 80 percent?
Here are four questions to ask yourself before you stop at 80 percent.
- Does this directly affect my executive’s credibility or decision-making?
If the answer is yes, 100 percent is required.
Anything that goes to, reflects on, or enables your executive’s (or team’s) performance demands 100 percent and full completion. That includes board materials, calendar accuracy, briefing notes, agendas, travel logistics, and communication on their behalf.
A Harvard Business Review study found that executives spend up to 23 hours a week in meetings, and ineffective preparation was among the top contributors to wasted executive time (HBR, 2017). When preparation is incomplete, the cost is not just inefficiency. It is credibility.
This is a boot tray moment. Inside, not beside.
- Is someone else relying on this being finished, not just started?
We sit at the center of workflows. When you leave something at 80 percent, someone else absorbs the remaining 20 percent, often unknowingly.
In operations research, this is called work transfer friction. When a task isn’t fully finished, the next person has to do more thinking, even if the missing piece looks minor. According to the American Psychological Association, task switching and incomplete handoffs significantly increase error rates and stress levels (APA, 2020).
If your 80 percent creates extra work for someone else, 100 percent is the job.
- Would I defend this choice if something went wrong?
This is an excellent gut check and the one I rely on most.
If a meeting falls apart, a decision is delayed, or an error is noticed, could you justify why you didn’t do 100 percent? Can you confidently say, “Stopping here was the right call”?
If your explanation sounds like justification instead of reasoning, that is a signal.
Strategic 80 percent sounds like:
“This did not require more because the risk was low and the impact was contained.”
Habitual 80 percent sounds like:
“I didn’t think it mattered.” or “I’ve never done that before, and it didn’t matter.”
Only one of those builds trust.
- Is this a one-time shortcut or a repeated pattern?
Occasional shortcuts are part of real work and often reflect the workload and emergency situations. We’ve all had those days where we were working at flat out speed, and it is easy to not complete things to 100 percent. That’s not a pattern, though. Patterns are reputations.
Researchers at Stanford have shown that consistent small behaviors shape how competence is perceived more than occasional big wins (Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2018). In other words, people trust what you do repeatedly, not what you do occasionally.
If you regularly stop short in the same areas, that is no longer prioritization. That is a standard you have set. It’s your habits becoming your norms.
But there are times when 80 percent is strategic.
80 percent may be the right choice when the task is exploratory, internal, reversible, or low-impact, such as drafts, brainstorming, early thinking, rough outlines and informal notes.
When I was asked to find out about a flight to New York and the times and prices, then 80 percent was the right choice for that task. When asked to book it, then 100 percent is the right choice.
The key difference is consequence. What is the consequence of not doing 100 percent of the task or effort? Looking at the flight times doesn’t have any negative consequences if you only do 80 percent. It might be the best use of my time not to invest the extra time. Efficiency is also important. But when I’m booking that flight? I need to ensure I’ve dotted every i and crossed every t.
At the end of each day, ask yourself three questions:
- What did I complete fully today, and why?
- What did I intentionally leave at 80 percent, and why didn’t I do 100 percent?
- Where did I stop short out of habit?
You are not looking for perfection. You are looking for awareness.
Because the goal is not to do everything at 100 percent. The goal is to ensure you don’t confuse “good enough” with “done.”
The boot tray was not about neatness. It was about respecting the system and the people relying on it.
You are part of many systems. When you choose deliberately where to be exact and where to be efficient, you stop operating on autopilot and start operating as a strategic professional.
And that is where the real value is created.