As designers, we are constantly striving for perfection. This is something many people can relate to but it’s especially prevalent among those of us whose job it is to literally create something beautiful.
Perfectionism can be one of the biggest detriments to quality creative output. It’s effect can be widespread.
Most design work follows the 80/20 rule, otherwise known as the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
This means that in many cases, 20% of the work takes 80% of the time. This 20% of work often comes at the end of a project in the form of small details which may be important, but are often heavily outweighed by factors such as getting the project done more quickly and more cost-effectively.
Good is better than great, when good is on time and on budget.
This abandonment of the need for perfectionism is not merely a personal battle, but I would argue is a fundamental precursor to being a good team member and a pillar in the journey to producing great work as an agency.
There is certainly a balance between showing things that aren’t ready versus letting your team members in the kitchen so to speak, but understanding this balance is the only route to effective collaboration.
Being vulnerable enough to show work that doesn’t look how you want it to, having the willingness to let your team members contribute to your design process and to help shape your ideas is a big part of being a great designer and a contributing member of your team.
It goes back to the 80/20 principle in that your initial idea probably took a fraction of the time to come up with and execute. The remaining time was most likely a deliberation over inconsequential details that will largely have no impact on the larger vision of the project at hand.
Tim Ferriss’ makes a suggestion in the 4-Hour Work Week that can help us to battle this all too common theme. Tim Ferris suggests the idea of setting aggressive, unrealistic timelines for tasks.
“If you haven’t defined the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what’s critical : without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur), will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiea jumps in to replace it.” — Tim Ferris, The 4-Hour Work Week
It’s a commonly observed phenomenon that whatever given amount of time people have for a task is the amount they will use. Whether someone is given two days for a task or two weeks, that is generally how long they will take. This is not an argument against properly estimating timelines in an industry that is plagued by tight deadlines, but rather a suggestion in boiling your thinking and work down to its absolute core.
When working in a big company with multiple team members working on their individual tasks in their unique role, this perfectionism can become especially dangerous. It can turn the project into a series of waterfall handoffs and processes.
Taking an anti-perfectionist approach has many benefits. Instead of each team member taking two weeks to execute their part of the project, everyone might take two days and come together. Your ideas may not be as polished, but they will be far more informed. Informed by all the other disciplines and vested interests involved in the project. All of a sudden, your piece of the pie is that much more cohesive and that much more aligned to your team members ways of thinking.
The problem with confronting perfectionism
The problem with confronting perfectionism is that it requires confidence. It requires vulnerability. Creative professions can be challenging in the sense that for many creatives, their work represents an innate part of themselves. It is a representation of who they are and what they believe. Showing a part of who you are to team members can be scary. You’re opening yourself up to the possibility that people might not like what they see. Especially if what they see is not that polished version you know you could produce if you had more time.
But the beauty of most peoples work is not in the perfect polished product, it is in the heart and soul of why they are producing that work in the first place. It is the goal they are striving to achieve, whatever that means in respect to their own unique contribution to the project.
It requires a disidentification from the work and who you are as a person. It requires confidence and it requires a willingness to be vulnerable. It requires dropping the ego, and keeping the bigger picture in mind.
It also requires team members at every level to be considerate of this fragility.
Because the problem with a lot of design feedback is that a lot of people receiving feedback don’t know how to take it. A larger problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to give it.
If the culture of the company is wrong, there can be an unhealthy sense of competition among team members, especially those of the same discipline. A culture where employees feel the need for their work to win for the accolades, rather than for the value it is providing to the project.
Perfectionism can be damaging. It can prevent you from producing work and it can prevent you from finishing work. It can prevent you from showing work in progress and allowing others to contribute to your ideas. It prevents others from having the chance to build upon your ideas, to grow them in an organic and wonderful way. On the one hand, this takes part of the onus off of you as the creator, but on the other hand, it creates something you never could have created on your own.
This is the beauty of collaboration and in fact, this is the true beauty of great work. Work that is multi-faceted, work that has multiple points of view, work that is informed by the many disciplines that make up an agency or a team. And most importantly of all — work that is informed by the unique viewpoints and ways of thinking of every member of the team.
The earlier these conversations happen, the stronger the work is. Taking into account all of these different facets does not take anything away from each individual’s unique contribution, but adds to it, enhances it and grows it into something more complex, and more beautiful than it could have been on its own.
The battle against perfectionism is no easy task. In fact, it can be a lifelong journey. But it is certainly one worth embracing, not merely for the benefit of yourself and your work, but for the way it will ultimately make you a more effective member of your team. A team member who embraces collaboration and who appreciates the unique perspective each additional person brings to a project. A team member who embraces the beauty of the idea, and the beauty of the fact that an idea is something which requires care and has unlimited potential for growth. A team member who recognizes that coming together is one of the greatest strengths we have.
