From the course: Time Management Tips

Stop perfectionism from hurting productivity

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Stop perfectionism from hurting productivity

- Perfectionism, the desire to get things just right, can be a valuable asset. It can help strive to do better and improve the work that they do everyday. However, it can be an obstacle to productivity if we allow our pursuit of perfectionism to get in the way of the result. It can cause us to delay our work, and it can cause the people around us to be frustrated and also get delayed if we are overfocused on perfectionism. I believe the solution lies in separating the process from the result. The process is the way in which we do things. It is the tools that we use to get a particular result. For instance, if I'm trying to make a sale through a company, the process would include my sales presentation and any printed collateral that I give to them. It's unreasonable to expect a process to be perfect. Whether it's through our failure and human nature or just random chance, things can break down in a process. Maybe we say one wrong word during our presentation, or maybe the printed material wasn't exactly the right color according to company standards. Because it's impossible to expect the process to be perfect, we must put our focus on progress, not perfection. Progress in the process means that we get better and better and better at it each time but that we accept the fact that there will be always something that can be improved. Instead, let's make our focus about perfectionism be on the result, so returning to this example, a perfect result would be making the sale. Even I make mistakes, I can still make the sale. I can still get a perfect result. If you look at gold medal athletes on championship-winning teams, you'll notice that they made mistakes along the way, yet they still won the championship. So if you catch yourself stuck in the mire of trying to get everything exactly right and trying too hard to make everything perfect, ask yourself, is your focus on the result or on the process? If you're focused on the process, seek to make progress, not perfection, and get clearer about the result that you want. If you need help, have conversations with your coworkers about the result and write it down. Then, you can all have a discussion about how to keep your work moving forward in spite of the team's natural imperfections.

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