Half-ass it with everything you've got

The phrase is not mine and it is regularly misread as permission to coast. It is the opposite. It says: decide the smallest version that would actually count, and then put everything into that version rather than into a larger one you will not finish.

The hard part is the deciding, not the doing. Every project has a defensible larger version, and the larger version is always more interesting to think about than the small one is to build. Scope inflation does not arrive as a decision. It arrives as a series of reasonable additions, each of which is genuinely a good idea.

So the rule I try to hold: the scope is fixed at the start and written down where I can see it, and anything I want to add goes on a separate list that I am not allowed to look at until the small version exists. Most of the list turns out to be wrong once the thing is real, which is the point.