Saturday, March 26, 2011
How Perfectionism Can Lead to Procrastination (and What to Do About It)
Lifehacker: "It's hard to get anything done if it needs to be perfect, because if you're constantly criticizing the work there is always more work to be done. But the real problem comes in when you don't even want to do the work because making it perfect seems too daunting.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
I don't consider myself a perfectionist, truthfully, and I am, by even less means, perfect in anything I do. Still, I can see many elements of myself in this article. A good example is my draftings. They are FAR from perfect, but I can't help but feel a perfect version of them is possible. Every time I draw something, I think that maybe THIS time I'll get closer to that "perfect" plate. I never do and rarely do I get more than possibly one chance to go back and make changes, so usually I feel forced to abandon it and leave it as is in order to move on to something else. I suppose, especially in light of this article, that's a good thing. If I spent a whole day worried about the line weight on this one plate, I'd never finish anything...
I agree with this article completely. I found that at the beginning of last semester I had it in my mind that I had to make work that was either perfect or (and this was the killer) "LOOKED as good as everyone else's." It took a bite out of my confidence and for a while I wasted way too much time and energy on details. I like the article's suggestion that there are gentle ways of questioning one's perfectionism and breaking one's own flawed logic. I would add that something that helped me a lot was changing my goal from making "perfect" work to making "work that I was PROUD OF." Once I did this, I changed from a perfectionist into someone with high standards, and my work got BETTER, believe it or not!
This article reminded me of the time we talked in Basic PTM about how no one wants to work with a perfectionist and its better not to be one. Being a perfectionist in everything you do and setting goals that must be met completely is always a way to fail. Striving for goals, and working hard on certain aspects is the way we learn to do things today. Nothing is ever perfect, we all know that, so trying to make it perfect, or pretty darn close, is just a task that will overcome you in the end. Set goals to strive for, and hope that you will get better, thats how you can get close to perfect.
Maybe it's just me being lazy, but I think that usually I'm not a perfectionist. It just takes an unreasonable amount of time. The effort in to product out reaches a plateau where you can exhaust yourself for comparably little gain. Working at that level is a recipe for burning yourself out. I think the really tricky part is finding the balance. Where is the point where you throw in the towel? Maybe that's something we're all unsure about. No one wants to be a quitter, no one wants to do less than their best. But at the same time, I feel like we all want to do other things too, like read books in the sunshine --or because it's been so cold: start that next project?
This article brings up multiple good points. Especially in a program like the one at CMU, being a perfectionist can only hurt a person's career here, and in the real world. With the world load given to the students, perfectionism can become detrimental and oftentimes is the reason students lose sight on the point of the activities they are doing. The lecture Joe Pino gave on this in the beginning of the year was fantastic, and I can only hope that more people took that class seriously. In the real world, no one could work with a perfectionist because their needs then become more important than the group's. This was perhaps the most important lesson from Joe Pino's lecture on Perfectionism, and one that this article did not address. Perfectionism can be the opposite of its intention, and hopefully does not get the best of anyone in the program.
I've been slowly learning that we have to let some things go. In an environment like the one here at the School of Drama, it is often difficult not to compare your work to that of others, and it is therefore difficult to acknowledge the fact that sometimes we have to just do what we can in the given circumstances and leave it at that. I have slowly been able to see that it is sometimes better to do a less elaborate project in exchange for, you know, SLEEP and SANITY. I think it's important to always do your best work, but to expect anyone or anything to be perfect is just unrealistic. As the article pointed out with its newspaper example, what's more important here is finding a balance that allows you to do good work, but to also do other things that will benefit you as a student or as a healthy person.
I think that this article is correct about its assumptions about perfectionism, but it's not as easy to fix. Perfectionism is a addiction. Finding the flaws in your logic is not that easy in fact it is often impossible to do on your own. I'am having one of the worst battles worst this right now. I feel as if CMU scheduling is forcing me to turn in shoddy work. I feel worse when I get a good grade on it, because I feel the work doesn't deserve it. I have found I work almost 2X as long as everyone else. I have taken small steps to correct my perfectionism like a rule for leaving the studio before 3am, but I find that then I turn my drafting in late, I can't seem to let it go. And I often find that the pressure makes me not want to do it at all, when earlier in the year I found drafting relaxing. Perfectionism is an addiction. One I wish they made a patch for.
Mary has a good point here. Perfectionism is really hard to let go of. Before coming to CMU, it was ingrained in me that everything had to be perfect or it wasn't worth doing. I've seen since then that this is not the case at all, but it is still hard to let go of that feeling. I've gotten a lot better of the past 2 years, but with certain things I still find myself getting really frustrated that my work is not better, or what I think it has the potential to be.
For me, it's not necessarily that I won't get the work done on time because of trying to edit it, but if I turn something in that has flaws I think I should have been able to fix, I get really upset with myself. My attitude completely changes, and that's what then prevents me from moving on. I get stuck dwelling on what I should've done better, and that leads to the procrastination of future work. As Mary said, it's an ongoing battle.
When I first saw this title, my jaw dropped out of shock because of how much this title depicts me. My whole life has consisted of battles between my desire to be perfect. However, it wasn't until I saw the negative affects of perfectionism, such as procrastination, that I realized that I needed to step away from the notion. I appreciate how this article suggests a solution similar, although, as a recovering perfectionist, it's easier said than done. The biggest contributor to my recovery was actually theater. Because every show had a definitive deadline that could not be pushed or bumped, your contribution to the show had to be by that time. This made me really analyze my time and understand that completing each task to a point of perfection would not work in theater's circumstances.
I agree wholeheartedly with this post. It is many a time that I have done my laundry instead of schoolwork and ended up organizing my entire room and scrubbing it clean. It just seems to snowball from one point and you can really get lost in the middle of it if you are not careful.
Post a Comment