Wade Armstrong

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The Perfectionist Confession

Posted Monday October 9, 2006 in Productivity

I am a perfectionist. When starting any project, I imagine the ideal outcome and strive for that. Of course, because I am a perfectionist I am also a procrastinator; it is impossible for anyone to achieve a truly ideal outcome, so tasks seem impossibly large and doomed to failure, and thus are avoided. The struggle for a perfectionist is to overcome that tendency to procrastination; I do so by ruthlessly using the next action concept of David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system.

There’s a lot to Getting Things Done, and I will not go into the entire system here. However, one key concept is breaking down all of your nebulous to-dos into a set of next actions. While any project plan includes a million tasks, and everyone’s everyday life features dozens of things that really should get done right now, the next action is specific, achievable, and immediate. Most of us have a tendency to think of large agglomerations of tasks, or projects as Allen calls them, as our next step, but projects — “get the oil changed,” “learn about that new system they just installed,” “get a gift for mom” — are really too vague to be specifically actionable. Need to get the oil changed? Your next action is to call the place you usually get your oil changed at to make an appointment. Need to learn about the new system? Your next action is to walk over to IT to get the manual (the action after that is to read it). Need to get a gift? Maybe you should spend some time making a list of what your mother likes or needs.

All of these next actions are specific, granular, and can immediately be done. For instance, there is no preparation needed before walking over IT to get the manual (unless you don’t know where IT is located, in which case you might consider making “find out where IT is” your next action). A to-do list containing these three to-dos — walk over to IT, call the oil change place, make a list of things the mom likes — can be completed fairly easily. Sure, there’s work involved, but it’s a massively more achievable to-do list than one reading “get the oil changed,” “learn about that new system,” “get gift for mom.” And, because each nebulous to-do is broken down into a series of next actions, you know what to do next, that is, drive to the oil change place, read the manual, pick one thing that mom likes and look it up on Amazon.

That actionability is half of what helps overcome my perfectionism and procrastination. A specific and concrete task is doable, right now, unlike a perfect outcome, which is unattainable and thus inspires procrastination. But no true perfectionist wants to give up his or her high standards, and next actions also provide a trick that I use to set my standards at a more realistic point without betraying the agreement I’ve made with myself to expect great things out of my work.

The key here is that each project is a series of next actions, and that perfection doesn’t need to be achieved in every single action. Completing an action both promptly and well leaves me with the foundation to bring the work to my standards in the end; to that extent, a next action done well, rather than perfectly, is a great outcome and compatible with a nearly-perfect final product. Conversely, if, at a later stage, I find that some of my work in the past has not been completed to the high standard I’d prefer, then the best I can do is to ensure a high-quality but not-perfect outcome by doing the current next step well.

Let’s see how this approach works in reality, by taking the example of how I wrote this entry. I’d like, in the abstract, each entry to be perfect, but that’s impossible, so it’s tempting to put off writing the entry until I can make one that’s perfect, which is never. So, it’s either compromise my values or never post anything to this blog. Well, I have a way around that. Here’s my process for writing an entry:

1. Come up with a topic. Note that the topic doesn’t have to be perfect, only interesting; at this point the entry can still be perfect.
2. Outline an entry on that topic. Again, an outline doesn’t have to be perfect, just conducive to writing the perfect article; it’s the words that come between the ideas, in the next step, that will make the entry excellent or perfect or mediocre.
3. Write the entry. Having an outline makes this seemingly-big task much more actionable; writing really means starting at the top of the outline and working my way through. I don’t have to be perfect, either, because my next step is:
4. Edit the entry. When I’m writing the entry, I can put off perfection to this stage. When I’m in this stage, well, I’ve already got an entry written, and I can only work with what I have. If it’s not perfect, I blame me yesterday, when I wrote the entry, and then I do my best to rewrite the entry into something of acceptable quality.
5. Copy-edit and post the entry. This is just a simple grammar and spelling check, I don’t leave myself enough time to rewrite the whole thing. Correct spelling can’t save a mediocre entry, so perfection is, again, not necessary; let’s just make sure there are no squiggly red underlines in Word.

Writing a perfect entry is a big, scary, unachievable goal. Doing each of those five steps reasonably well and then pushing perfection into another stage lets me meet my standards while actually having a concrete, specific thing to do next. And, in that way, I conquer the impossible, and avoid procrastination, using Getting Things Done’s concept of next actions.