Today while I was crossing off a couple things on my weekly to-do list (which I mentioned last year as a more viable alternative to “today” lists for people who don’t have a lot of things to do on a daily basis), my girlfriend poked fun at me for my need to “check things off.” This certainly wasn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, since I have lots of lists for all sorts of things. There are two reasons I make all these lists: 1) I have a horrible memory, so I will very quickly forget about things that I don’t write down, and 2) it definitely fulfills my completionist tendencies. This led me to the idea for this post.
There is certainly nothing inherently wrong with being a perfectionist or a completionist, but it does come with its challenges. The main challenge being that at some point, you have to accept the fact that you can’t truly accomplish either one, and it is something that you have to accept on your own. I feel like I have been able to mostly control my perfectionist side, but my completionist side is tougher to quell.
While perfectionism and completionism tend to go hand in hand, they are different. Perfectionism has to do with the impulse to keep working on something until it is, in the creator’s mind, perfect. Completionism has to do with the drive to finish a task or a goal with absolutely nothing left to do. It has to do with the former being more subjective, and the latter being more objective. That is why you tend to see perfectionism more often in creative types, and completionism more often in logical types. As an engineer, I get a mix of both sides, which makes it even more difficult.
The Plight
The main difficulty with being either a perfectionist or a completionist is that it’s mentally taxing. With every single thing you do, you just have to do it right. With perfectionists, it’s only right if it’s flawless; with completionists, it’s only right if the whole checklist is accounted for. And if you don’t do it right, then you are a failure, and that failure will eat away at your mind for a long time. So you end up with a lot of people with these tendencies who don’t like committing to things that they are unsure about. If they don’t know that they can do it right, they would rather not do it at all than risk failing.
One of the areas where it’s very easy to see both of these dynamics is in modern video games. Perfectionists will be aiming for flawless scores or runs, while completionists are trying to get all the achievements/trophies, or 100%, every game they play. A lot of times the developers of these games will mix the two so that you can only complete a game by being perfect at it. With those kinds of games, the only way to really win is to not play at all because it stops being fun very quickly.
This leads to the second biggest difficulty, which is that trying to be perfect or trying to complete everything is a gigantic time sink. The opportunity cost can be significant. Of course, for some players, they don’t mind it because the game that they want to be perfect in or do everything in is their game. They don’t care about playing other games besides that one, or maybe they just have a few that they rotate between for months or years. But for those who like having variety (like me), trying to get number 1 on a leaderboard or reach 100% in a 200+ hour game isn’t practical. So that leaves you with two choices: either be frustrated that you can’t master the game to the level you want, or be frustrated that you can’t play as many games as you want. I fight this battle constantly, and it really is frustrating.
The last big difficulty is that the two things above tend to compound on themselves. It’s a very easy spiral to get into where your expectations just get higher and higher, regardless of your rate of success, and your criteria for finishing get out of control. In fact, the more you fail, the harder you tend to be on yourself the next time around, making it that much harder to succeed. If you fail enough times, you don’t feel like taking any risks anymore, which means growth is no longer possible. This is why it is essential to get over that feeling of failure as early as possible.
Getting Over It
Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot that can be said about getting over these hurdles other than you just have to do it at some point if you want to escape the cycle. From my own experience, the only way I’ve been able to stop the tendencies is to just recognize when it happens, accept that I simply can’t let it control me, and then move on. It does get easier with time though. You can potentially get some help with pushing you forward, but I feel that only goes so far. You have to want to get better at it yourself, and having someone else tell you when to let go removes that decision making you need.
I will provide some examples of things that I do to make the decisions easier to make. The perfectionist in me tends to only come out when it comes to making things. When it comes to work, it’s easier to accept that nothing is going to perfect because there are deadlines and things are always going to be changing. It’s still frustrating at times, but I’ve had to do it for so long now that it’s easier to keep going. When it comes to writing, I find that the best way to keep moving is to set time restrictions on writing time, and do as few reviews as possible. With these posts, for example, I set aside about 3 hours to write them, no need to worry about it too much. The next day I will look over it for grammar/spelling mistakes, and then just post it. Is it perfect? Of course not, but at least something is getting done. As any productivity expert will tell you, getting a lot of average things out is always better than never getting out one perfect thing.
The completionist in me is a little harder to keep down. As stated above, I tend to make a lot of lists to keep track of everything that I have going on. And while checking them off is very satisfying, it is still a burden that I don’t really like having to worry about. I look at my backlogs all the time with a feeling of helplessness, knowing that I can never finish them all. So, all I can do is accept that I can’t finish them all. I have to choose which ones are most important to me, and just focus on those. I have to constantly get over the fact that I have spent a good amount of money in the past on things that I will never get to enjoy. And you know what, that’s okay. It’s just money. I learn from that and spend my money more wisely in the future.
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Part of me feels like this post is useless since it doesn’t give any good advice or tips, but the other part of me knows that I had to get it out of my head. Like I said already, it’s not perfect, but it’s something to keep me going. Maybe someday I will hear from a real expert on the topic and I’ll be able to revisit it with better advice.
Until next week.