Thoughts on perfectionism, and how to actually finish something by self-imposing deadlines

In the weeks before the vacation I would finish more tasks and projects than for the same amount of time at any in other week in the year, and it is all because of the deadline. This doesn’t only apply at the workplace, but also in my private life when personal projects, small tasks and even chores get done.

I was a perfectionist even for the things that didn’t need to be perfect, but over the years I am learning how to recognize “good enough”, do the “minimum viable product” approach, but it was to force myself to think that way until I started adding deadlines to every thing that needs to be done. For a perfectionist, simply knowing that something won’t be perfect could be a barrier to even starting, and we should unlearn that. We should strive for “good enough”, get it out there, and improve afterwards only if the improvement can make it a “better enough” to justify the additional time investment. But, we have to learn to recognize when something is actually good enough.

It is easier when you recognize that you are probably not a true perfectionist if you have ever made anything. Perfectionism is an unreachable goal, as nothing is and nothing can be perfect. Most perfectionist’s creations are never finished and shipped because the result was not perfect, we ran out of resources for for completion, or we’d just lose the motivation to continue working on it when the perfection looks too distant or unreachable, or something else with a bigger potential to be perfect would come along. Things we actually “finish” for a third person is easier to do exactly because of a limiting factor, such as running out of time. Look around you, and you should be able to find a flaw in every single commercial product. You would no have it if the manufacturer was striving for perfection. Even if you can find a flaw, there must be at least some way to improve it even further, so the thing was not perfect in the first place. Perfectionism is not a virtue, it is a sort of an OCD.

We should all learn to find a point in time when the potential yield plateaus for the same rate of investment of time and energy. Try to understand this one.

You can imagine the simultaneous growth of the work and the time invested, but at a certain point the progress of the work slows down while the time investment remains the same. At a certain point the growth will be so minimal that the growth curve becomes almost flat, and we should probably stop before that point. This doesn’t have to be for some grand project, but even a small task in a bigger project. As a simple example, I used to sculpt busts of famous people, and I would go online to collect reference images to help me with a task. Most of the required images I would find within 15 minutes, but those images were not “exactly” what I needed, so I’d continue to use other search engines, look through less known stock photos websites, dig deeper through flickr, and three hours later I’d have a few more images, but usually I wouldn’t find anything much better than what I had found in the first 15 minutes. At the 15th minute the yield curve plateaued, and all the additional time was actually wasted, because those additional 3 hours would have been spent in something that would have given better yield on some other task.

If you do something often, it will be easier to recognize the point in time after which it doesn’t make sense to invest more time into a task. In most projects we run out of time and we had to finish it to a “good enough” state to ship it; and that is the solution for even personal projects. Make deadlines for everything, even for smaller tasks.

Start every task with a goal and think how long it should take you (or someone else you’d pay to do it) to finish the task and reach the goal. Start the process and check the time often or set alarm at 3/4 of the task deadline. You can also use an app that produces a beep sound in a regular intervals to remind you for every 10 minutes that pass, to keep you on the track. At the end of the day you will have a lot of things finished.

For this article I have allocated 45 minutes and this is how far I got. It is not perfect, far from it, but nothing is, and no matter how much time I invest in it there will always be something else to say and better way to say it. For the next thing you do after reading this you have 15 minutes to complete… Go!