Don’t Let Perfection Be the Enemy of Productivity

Productivity isn’t about getting more done. It’s about what you get done.

1. You’re reluctant to designate decisions as “unimportant.”

But perfectionists have a hard time designating decisions as unimportant. They like to be in control of everything. Why? Because imperfections bother them more than they do other people. 

Try using heuristics to quickly decide or delegate with the expectation that you will get much faster and pretty good decisions overall but not perfect ones.

2. You feel morally obligated to overdeliver.

Let’s say someone offers to pay you $1,000 for a service. If you’re a perfectionist, providing $1,000 of value might not seem like enough. You might think that you need to give what your competitors would charge $1,500 for because you want to outperform. You think: “If I don’t overdeliver, I’m underdelivering.” 

Understand what it’s costing you to always aim for outperformance. What else don’t you have time, energy, attention, and willpower for? Perhaps your own health, your big goals, or your family. If you assess that the costs are significant, try having a rule of thumb for when you’ll overdeliver. For instance, you might decide that in three out of ten situations in which you have the urge to do so, you will, but not in the other seven.

3. You get excessively annoyed when you aren’t 100% consistent with good habits. 

When perfectionists want to adopt new habits, they tend to fall into one of three categories. They bite off more than they can chew and their plans are too onerous to manage; they avoid starting any habit unless they’re 100% sure they can hit their goal everyday, which leads to procrastination; or they take on only those habits that they can stick to no matter what. 

Have a mechanism in place for checking that you’re not sticking to a habit just because you’re worshiping at the altar of self-discipline.

Perfectionism is often driven by striving for excellence, but it can be self-sabotaging if it leads to suboptimal behavior like continuing habits beyond their usefulness, overdelivering when you don’t have to, or overthinking every decision you make.