Antiperfectionism

I’ve recently become more aware of how perfectionist I am, and how it affects my life.

Done is Better Than Perfect

I’ll explain by example. A few months ago, I started tracking my monthly spending so I could understand better where my money was going. I created a budget for myself using this lovely piece of software called GnuCash. Then I created dozens of accounts, put in my fixed assets and liabilities, entered each receipt as a set of transactions, and averaged my spending over time in order to create a realistic budget.

I followed my budget until I reached my financial goal. It sounds like everything went as intended, but recently something occurred to me: I didn’t need to use double-entry bookkeeping and track everything down to the last centavo to reach my financial goal. It was like using a bazooka to kill a fly. I could’ve met my goal by just doing a few rough calculations and changing some habits.

Trust me, there are many more examples I could give of me optimizing things that don’t need to be optimized, but I think I got my point across.

So why did I do it? I think it’s because I feel a compulsion to be highly precise about things, even when the need for such precision isn’t really there. And for me, that’s the essence of perfectionism—doing a huge amount of additional work to achieve a marginally better result.

Sometimes getting the best possible result is worth the additional work, but in most circumstances good enough is good enough. I have enough going on in my life that I can’t afford to waste time and energy perfecting everything anymore. Accepting this limitation has boosted my efficiency and reduced my stress. I’m able to get more done with less, because I’ve stopped hyperfixating on tiny details that don’t matter in the end.

Now whenever I get the urge to perfect my work, I just repeat my new mantra, “Done is better than perfect”, and leave it at that.

Decision-Making

The desire for perfection also extends to my decision-making. While there’s value in considering all my options and making decisions carefully, one eventually arrives at the point of diminishing returns. I’ve literally spent years considering and reconsidering my options without arriving at a decision. Doing that is not only unproductive, it’s stressful.

There are several problems with overcontemplation. The first is that the way you get better at making decisions isn’t by meticulously scrutinizing every possibility ad infinitum. It’s by taking a reasonable amount of time to consider your options, making a reasonably good decision, then seeing its results and iterating on them so you can make better decisions in the future.

The second difficulty with overcontemplation is that the best decision often isn’t even knowable in advance, due to limited information. So you’re expending cognitive resources that you could be using on other things, just to obtain the same result anyway.

The third concern with overcontemplation is that, unless you’re making a huge life decision, the difference between the best decision and a decent decision is marginal. I.e, making a decent decision instead of the best one isn’t going to radically alter the trajectory of your life, so it’s not worth worrying about.

I find that the same mantra I use for tasks can also be applied to decisions: “Done is better than perfect.” So lately, when I’m hesitating for too long, I just make up my mind. Because having a decision, even a bad one, often leads me to better outcomes in the end than having no decision at all. At least I can iterate on a bad decision. If the choice never even gets made, I won’t know if it’s good or bad, and I can’t iterate on it.

The Need to Finish a Task I’ve Started

Another OCD-like tendency of mine I’ve been working on is this need to work all the way from start to finish in everything I do. I tend to hyperfocus on one task until it’s complete, regardless how long it takes me to complete it, and I get very irritable if I’m interrupted and have to go do some other unrelated thing.

What I’ve realized recently is that my unwillingness to stop a task and resume it later is a direct result of having a small working memory and monotropic attention. What happens is this:

1. I realize I don’t have enough time to complete the task in one sitting.
2. Since I can’t complete the task in one sitting, I put it off hoping I’ll find that uninterrupted block of time later.
3. I keep putting off the task indefinitely, never finding that block of time because it doesn’t exist.
4. Eventually, I get so desperate that I begin the task anyway.
5. After I’ve begun the task, I have to finish it, so I neglect other things like my job, close relationships, and sleep, until the task is done.

Subdividing Tasks

One solution to the aforementioned chain of events I’ve been exploring is breaking up tasks into subtasks and completing those subtasks all at once.

The “subdivision strategy” lessens the overhead of resurrecting information into my limited working memory because each subtask demands less working memory than the full task, and I can just outsource tracking the full task to a system like GTD.

This strategy also mitigates my monotropic attention problem because there’s fewer interruptions—I’m able to find time to complete subtasks from start to finish more easily than I could find time to perform the entire task from start to finish. And I don’t end up starting the whole task at an inopportune time due to desperation.

Acknowledging My Priorities

Although I have a strategy now, there are still times when I have to interrupt what I’m doing and move on to something else. I’ve noticed that when I get absorbed in a task, I tend to lose sight of my other priorities. When that happens, I try to remember the bigger picture by telling myself:

• “$CURRENT_TASK is not a priority.”
• “$CURRENT_TASK doesn’t have to be completed right now.”
• “I can come back to $CURRENT_TASK later after I do $OTHER_THING.”
• “Not doing $CURRENT_TASK now will leave me something to look forward to later.”

This positive self-talk helps my brain not go into full-on panic mode whenever I’m interrupted.

Conclusion

I’m glad I was at least able to gain some self-awareness about my perfectionism and that I’m learning to allow the pendulum to swing back in the opposite direction. As always, thanks for reading and I hope this entry turns out to be useful for others out there who also struggle with perfectionism.