You can't give everything everything

Your attention is limited. Your time is limited. Your effort is limited. So are your money, energy, patience and many of the other resources available to you. You are finite. That means every demand competes, directly or indirectly, with other possible uses of those resources. Something may deserve more. Something may deserve less. Something may deserve nothing. And sometimes the better choice is to keep something in reserve.

A snag makes a claim — not a demand

Something catches your attention. Now what? You could ignore it. Give it another look. Think about it. Ask someone. Investigate it for three hours. Spend money on it. Do something. Each requires resources. A snag doesn't tell you how much it deserves. It merely makes something available for another judgment: Is this worth more of my limited resources? Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes no. Sometimes: Not yet.

More isn't always better

We often talk as though giving something more demonstrates that we value it more. More time. More effort. More thought. More money. But resources spent here are resources that aren't available somewhere else. And more may not improve the outcome enough to justify the additional cost. An extra hour might help. The tenth extra hour might add almost nothing. So the question isn't simply: Could I do more? It is also: would more be worth it? Good enough may sometimes be better than best — particularly when the pursuit of best consumes resources that could do more useful work elsewhere.

Full power — briefly

Efficiency doesn't always mean using fewer resources at every moment. Sometimes the efficient choice is the opposite. A difficult problem may deserve your full cognitive power for a short time. Concentrate. Investigate. Make the judgment. Then switch off and release those resources. The aim isn't to operate permanently at maximum capacity. It is to allocate what the situation deserves, when it deserves it — and then make those resources available again. Maximum isn't necessarily optimum.

Keep something in reserve

Think of a electric car battery. For a long journey, you may want 100%. For ordinary use, 80% may be more than enough. And keeping something available matters because you don't know what might be around the corner. Money works similarly. Just because you have it doesn't mean you need to spend it. The same can apply to attention, effort and cognitive capacity. Using everything available now may leave too little for what happens next. So resource allocation isn't only a competition between: A or B. It may also include: A, B, wait — or keep the resource.

Now has to live with tomorrow

This creates a recurring tension. Something may benefit me now but leave fewer resources for me tomorrow. The fastest solution may create more work later. An easy agreement may preserve today's relationship but create tomorrow's problem. An exhausting final hour may produce a tiny improvement while reducing what you can do next. There isn't one correct balance. Different receivers, purposes and circumstances will produce different judgments. But tomorrow has a claim on some of today's resources too. The receiver making today's choice is also helping create the circumstances encountered by tomorrow's receiver.

Priorities can change

What deserves resources isn't fixed. Change the environment and you may change which differences are consequential. Something that mattered greatly yesterday may matter much less today. Something previously ignored may suddenly deserve everything you've got. So we reprioritise. And one way we reprioritise is by reweighting the competing claims on our resources. This doesn't happen only during emergencies. We do it continually. New information arrives. Circumstances change. Costs change. Opportunities change. We change. What deserves more can become less. What deserved less can become more.

Efficiency

There is another useful question: Can I achieve something sufficiently good with fewer resources? Can I do the same task more quickly? With less effort? With less money? With fewer steps? Without consuming resources that add little to the result? Efficiency isn't necessarily about minimising resource use. Using too few resources can be wasteful too if the task then fails and has to be repeated. The aim is not: Use as little as possible. It is closer to: Use enough for the purpose — without unnecessary waste. Good enough applies to efficiency too.

Better has a cost

Suppose you've already produced something good enough. Could you make it better? Probably. But better isn't free. Another hour. Another revision. Another dollar. Another conversation. Another thought. So improvement creates another judgment: Does this small improvement justify what it will cost? Sometimes yes. And importantly, the improvement itself can be tiny. One small difference that you judge to be better than what you had before is still better. But sometimes the better decision is to stop. Good enough. Move on.

Could we get better at this?

Perhaps better resource allocation doesn't mean always spending less. It means becoming a little better at deciding: What deserves more? What deserves less? What deserves full power for a short time? What can wait? What should be abandoned? What can be done more efficiently? And what should be kept in reserve for something we haven't encountered yet? We won't always get those judgments right. Circumstances change. Information is incomplete. Outcomes are uncertain. But perhaps we can become a little better at asking the question: Is this worth more of my limited resources? And then deliberately decide what, for now, is good enough.