The fear of failure greatly hinders work. Many successful people have given up on perfectionism. This is not surprising: they have to make a lot of urgent and important decisions every day. If surgeons would only do something with 100% certainty, each of them would have a much bigger graveyard.

In 2010, “Done is better than perfect” appeared on the wall of Facebook*’s headquarters. It is designed to remind employees that perfectionism is devastating and unhelpful.

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What if Facebook* didn’t launch until it was “perfect”? Most likely, this social network would not have appeared yet.

Where does perfectionism come from

Bob Pozen, author of Extreme Productivity, asks students if they consider themselves perfectionists during the first lecture of a productivity course. Usually, about half of students answer in the affirmative and talk about demanding parents or teachers who have made it into their heads that assignments should be completed with accuracy and accuracy.

I believe people are not born perfectionists, but family, school, and environment help them learn this way of thinking. And because it’s a habit, you can get rid of it.

Bob Posen

The big problem with perfectionists is that they spend too much time on tasks that are not so important or do not require such a thorough approach. That’s why they don’t have enough time: there are too few hours in the workday to perfect everything.

How to fight perfectionism

Elizabeth Grace Saunders, author of How to Invest Your Time Like Money, works as a time management consultant helping people get rid of the need to be perfect and start spending time on things that really matter. It offers several ways to get rid of perfectionism.

Don’t put labels

Instead of calling yourself a perfectionist, say you “sometimes tend to act like a perfectionist.” So you’re kind of allowing yourself to do things differently.

Recognize that perfectionism is getting in the way

Now it’s important to realize that by giving your all to one thing, you forget about other areas that require your attention. For example, perfectionists sometimes just don’t do the right things or do them too late, and this prevents them from achieving success. If they had lowered the bar right away, things would have been different.

Limit yourself

A perfectionist will work on a task until he gets a “perfect” result, no matter how long it takes. That’s why Saunders recommends setting deadlines.

Give each task a certain amount of time (preferably half as much as usual) and monitor your speed to meet the deadline.

This tip has helped many people get rid of perfectionism. They’ve realized that not doing something perfectly doesn’t mean being lazy and indifferent to work results. You just look at your time budget and say, “OK, how much time can I devote to this task to get a good result?”

Allocate your time with INO

Often, perfectionists simply don’t understand that different tasks require different amounts of time and effort. To categorize cases by importance, Saunders recommends using the INO technique:

Investment objectives: profitability is high, time will pay off handsomely.

Neutral tasks: you get what you put in (for example: meetings with employees or standard reports).

Optimized tasks: the result does not depend on the time spent (example: email analysis).

By distributing tasks, you will understand what you should devote more time to. If working with email is a streamlined task, you shouldn’t reread and rewrite the email three or four times: this time is useful for tasks from the first group.

Here are a few important questions to help you determine which category a particular task should be assigned to:

Is this important to me?

If so, by how much?

Is it worth it to perform the task at a high level, and not how will it turn out? Will the effort pay off?

What is the minimum set of actions?

How much time do I have for this task?

Do you consider yourself a perfectionist? Doesn’t that stop you from living?

Source: https://lifehacker.ru/no-perfectionism/

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