When we buy a home, many of us create nice-to-have and must-have lists to sort out our desires and priorities. This allows us to have plans that encourage tempering of emotions when the time comes for decisions to be made. It also allows us to consider and discuss with others our true preferences and biases before we make decisions.

Most of us do this when we buy a home. Most of us do this when we make other major purchases, when we plan vacations, and when we make important decisions such as selecting the place for higher education. 

We create these must-have and nice-to-have lists to attend to our interests and the interests of others near and dear to us.

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There is value in following a similar approach when we critique other people's performance.

If we feel compelled to express criticism, we should at least be considerate enough to reduce the quantity of it to the must-have items.

There's no need to express each and every piece of shortcoming. 

Instead, we can create the long list of our complaints/objections/grievances. Then we can sort and rank them in must-have and nice-to-have lists, much the same way we would do if we were determining the key criteria for a major purchase. Then we could select the most-important must-have. And, we could limit our criticism to that single item.

When it comes to delivering criticism it is better to conclude every little bit hurts rather than every little bit helps.

While I have not heard about studies to confirm this, common sense suggests the laying on of criticism-item after criticism-item yields diminishing returns. That assumes the desired return is persuading the criticized person to agree with the criticism.

On the other hand, if the goal is annoying, angering, or alienating the person being criticized then this Thought Post will not be helpful.