Does Perfectionism Kill Your Productivity?

In a time when working from home is the new norm, productivity is pivotal to keeping the work-life balance in check while progressing efficiently. This means prioritizing, working in fixed timeframes, setting short-term goals, and taking bite-sized work at a time. But what happens when you are always aiming for perfection, then does perfectionism kill your productivity?

Before Getting To That, Let Us Understand the Meanings of the Terms ‘Productivity’ and ‘Perfectionism’:

Productivity is a measure of what you get done, whereas perfectionism is a measure of how that is done. Productivity means the ability to be creative, but not at the cost of speed and quality; giving results either at a low pace or with lower quality are signs of unproductivity. Whereas, perfectionism doesn’t account for speed but only quality since its held to high standards and is never satisfied whilst seeking the “perfect version”.

Perfectionism is a strength that many believe to have, even show off in their resumes, until it molds into an obsession, with getting things right, come whatever may. Good is never good enough and good enough is rarely PERFECT. Having high standards for your work is great but it shouldn’t inhibit your growth, incapacitate you and leave you constantly unhappy and disappointed. Author Stephen Guise in ‘How to be an im-perfectionist’ says, “If you don’t manage to reframe perfectionism as a damaging and inferior mindset, the illusion of its superiority will thwart your desired changes.”

By the Pareto Principle 80% of the value comes from 20% of the work, a productive person will understand this. While a perfectionist focuses too much on perfecting the other 80% of the work too much, they only bring 20% of the value.

Perfectionism can not be balanced with productivity if a perfectionist continues to be bound to the following traits:

• Highly critical of your work
• Holding yourself to unrealistically high standards
• Focused on results
• Easily depressed by unmet goals
• Fear of failure or fear of not matching the set parameters
• Defensiveness towards their work
• All or no thinking

This makes a perfectionist unable to be content with their work and continues to make their ceiling unachievable, even when the work is excellent, it will not be for them.

And this makes perfectionism extremely difficult to balance on the scale of productivity.

So yes, perfectionism is a productivity killer when out of balance, not just that it’s self-sabotaging as well and is a contentment killer, preventing you from celebrating your wins. As Leo Tolstoy in AnnaKarenina says “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”

But if the balance is maintained and perfectionism doesn’t lead to sub-optimal behaviors or patterns of rigidness, it doesn’t kill your productivity.

When Does Perfectionism Kill Your Productivity?

Trait#1 When You’re Reluctant To Designate Decisions As “Unimportant”

Since as a perfectionist you like to be in control, every decision for you is important and needs to be thought through, even when in reality it’s an unimportant one. You get so fearful of imperfections that you designate every tiny matter as worthy of your full effort. Subconsciously, you become highly accustomed to micromanaging.

How to keep the balance: Find your ‘Yes’ so it’s easy to say ‘No’

In modern life, decision fatigue can be intense on productivity. You can learn to let go of the decision-making burden, at least the minor choices whose results have zero or no impact. You can try using heuristics to either quickly decide or delegate a decision, accepting that you will make faster and good decisions overall, not necessarily little perfect ones. For instance, one of the heuristics could be: if you’ve thought about doing something three times, you will just get on and do it without further deliberating.

You can always refer to the priority levels matrix a) Escalating the important and urgent b) Cultivating the important but not urgent c) Accommodating the unimportant but urgent d) Delegating the unimportant and not urgent

Trait#2 When You Feel Morally Obligated To Overdeliver

Your belief that you need to beat expectations in any situation can manifest in several ways, where you always have the itch to outperform. You believe what’s generally reasonable doesn’t apply to you and if you don’t over-deliver, you are under-delivering.

This belief is also surrounded by loads of fear leading to the worst possible imaginations of some catastrophic consequences; that if you fail to overdeliver your client won’t want to work with you or you don’t get that promotion you always wanted.

How to keep the balance: Keep a plan ready for course correction once such thoughts begin to appear. 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. You have to understand that this aim for outperformance comes at a cost; a cost of not just your productivity but maybe your health, energy, and time with loved ones. Once you run such an assessment, having a rule of thumb will come easy.

Try adopting the Pomodoro Technique which will help you to take scheduled breaks and not get overworked. Here’s how it works:

• Work without any distraction for 25 mins by the timer
• Followed by a 5 min break wherein instead of going on social media, try to walk a bit, stretch, and close your eyes
• Start the 25 min no distraction work again with all your focused effort
• Now a 10 min break for breathing, visualization exercises, or attending to ad-hoc tasks such as reverting to a call, an e-mail
• Repeat.

Trait#3 When You Become Too Rigid To Tolerate Any Inconsistency

When you want to adopt new habits, you either bite off more than you can chew making strenuous plans to manage—you avoid starting such a habit, leading to procrastination— or you take on easy habits that you know you can stick to.

How to keep the balance: Since productivity demands creativity and creativity feeds on flexibility, you need to constantly weed out the habits that you’ve outgrown, even if it means breaking a streak. When conventional self-discipline begins to turn into compulsion, you must learn to take a break and deviate from that ingrained habit or pattern of behavior. For the sake of keeping up your productivity, it’s wise to regularly review the opportunity cost of any activities or behaviors you diligently do to make sure they are currently the best use of your physical and mental energy—that you’re not sticking to a habit just because you’re worshiping at the altar of self-discipline.

Your Takeaways From This Read:

Perfectionism, like any other characteristic, is desirable in controlled conditions. It kills productivity and can be self-sabotaging if you continue habits beyond their usefulness, overdeliver when you don’t have to, or overthink every decision you make.

Productivity determines our growth, and our success hence, if you are a perfectionist, you must learn to align your drive for perfection with your routines since you can perform most tasks better only by achieving this balance.