How many revisions are enough?

Reworking, editing, checking, changing. How long do we spend working on the next version?

Documents, reports and presentations travel up and down a company's hierarchy to be changed, edited, revised, and approved. Changes are made but it’s still not sent out or shared. It’s time for another round of changes.

And another round.

Up and down it goes.

The heart of the message gets lost and in its place, a wordy banal message like every other. All in the pursuit of accuracy, control, correctness, getting it ‘right’, perhaps to counter the the fear of it being ‘wrong’ or imperfect.

But it can never be perfect because things change. And we are human.

The tinkering is a cover, it’s stalling and fear. Hours working and reworking, writing and editing, tinkering. And the waiting ... the waiting in between every revision.

It’s not productive.

Want a gain in productivity? Check how many versions that report or document has been through; how many hands have been on it, eyes that have seen it, how many times it's been checked, revised and re-checked. What’s really going on here? How many revisions will be enough before it goes live?