10 Sep Why Being a Perfectionist Will Kill Your Productivity

If you tend to set high bars for yourself and always try to put your best foot forward to achieve your goals, your perfectionism could be killing your productivity. While striving for perfection can help you achieve great results, it can also prevent you from being your best and can foster a lack of productivity. Here are several ways that being a perfectionist will quickly kill your productivity.

Perfectionism Makes You Less Efficient

When you strive for perfection in the tasks that you do, even when you've completed the task, you will linger on to find new ways that you can improve. This lingering process might start as a quick ten-minute process but can quickly escalate until you find yourself spending an hour or more looking for things to improve. This causes you to spend way too much time on a task that required and puts you behind schedule.

You Become Less Effective
As a perfectionist, you probably do little things because they seem like a good addition. However, you fail to consciously think whether those additions are necessary. Sometimes, those additions not only fail to add value but might even ruin things.

You Tend to Procrastinate
When you have perfectionist tendencies, you often wait for the perfect moment, which tends to overcomplicate a project. What is a simple task, might get blown out of proportion, to the extent that it then becomes intimidating subconsciously. This causes you to procrastinate on working on it because you are waiting for the ever "perfect" moment before you begin. Unfortunately, this perfect moment never happens until it's too late.

You Miss the Bigger Picture
Since you are too hung up on the little details, you tend to forget about the bigger picture and the end goal. It isn't uncommon to see better jobs in pruning the trees than the growth of the forest.

You Fuss Over Unfounded Problems
Most perfectionists tend to anticipate problems before they crop up and develop solutions to address the issues. It ends up becoming an obsession to pre-empt potential problems. Unfortunately, most of the problems that you envision never surface or they don’t matter as much as you thought they would.

While striving to aim for higher standards isn’t a bad thing, when the quest for perfection turns into an obsession, it will quickly kill your productivity. The answer isn’t to stop striving for perfection, but rather to be conscious of your perfectionist tendencies and manage them accordingly.