Image by Thorsten Becker via Flickr
A strong connection exists between perfectionism and procrastination.
Wanting something to be perfect represents a huge mental burden and can make a simple task turn into a huge energy sink. Consequently, tasks that are truly finite, become incomprehensible in size, and therefore it’s much more appealing to push it off. “This blog post needs to be incredible! ……I’ll do it some other time. I’m simply not inspired enough right now.”
I think a natural predisposition towards perfectionism is why people don’t utilize evolutionary design more readily, at least not until they have more experience making things . We want it to be brilliant from the beginning, which most likely isn’t possible. Eveolutionary design, taking something that somewhat works and iterating over it, is messy and can feel a bit brutish, a stab at our intellect. So instead of just getting started with something, they want it to be perfect, and they push it off to another day.
Grand plans get thwarted because they don’t get started. Perfection won’t come if you can’t stomach a little (or a lot of) imperfection.
Yifei Zhang has the right insight on this, “I often tell myself, ‘I’m going to spend 5 minutes on this.’” I agree wholeheartedly. When I’m working, and I put in a really good 5 minutes, I’m compelled to finish. If it’s something creative that I enjoy, I’m borderline obsessed with finishing, or at least reaching some sort of satisfying checkpoint.
I consider the recognition of the connection between perfectionism and procrastination coupled with “The 5 Minute Rule”to be the key to conquering a lot of procrastination. In the very least, those 5 minutes will show you that doing the work really isn’t that bad, and you can then employ other productivity techniques to bring the task to a close.
-Kevin
9.3.2011
