Tag Archives: procrastination

Action, Goals, Practice

Perfect vs Good

I’m doing things a little different with this post. I posted a video to my new YouTube channel on this same topic, which will be linked at the end. I won’t double up like this for all future posts, but may do it occasionally. Read below, watch the video, or do both.

 

I’ve put off many things waiting to gather more information, get better gear, the right situation and so on. While being more prepared is usually a good thing, and different circumstances might make things easier, it’s still usually just another form of procrastination.

Last week I was reading something and was reminded of something Voltaire said (though he was likely relating an ancient saying), “perfect is the enemy of the good.” Incremental improvements take increasingly more effort and time the better things become. In economics it’s called diminishing marginal returns.

One form of the Perfect vs Good problem is Analysis Paralysis. It’s really just procrastination under the guise of due diligence, a way to feel productive without accomplishing much of any worth.

When you wait for circumstances to be “right” or “enough” information, you hang the possibility of success on the external world over which you have no control. In the meantime, you could have started, accumulated results over the otherwise wasted time, and learned from your experiences. Rather than reading everything you can about the topic, you can figure out the exact information you need to solve actual problems and further grow.

In the case of any online endeavor that relies on building an audience, like my new YouTube channel (or a blog, e-commerce site, freelancing, etc.), if I started 3 months ago when I had the idea the basic means to get going, I’d already have 3 months in front of people; 3 months of comments and criticisms; 3 months of honing my message, narrowing or expanding my target audience; and so on.

While I waited for the perfect situation to start, no one knew about it, I could only guess about possible obstacles, and I missed any opportunities that may have come about with action. And it’s not like any information that I thought I needed wouldn’t be there if and when I actually needed it. I’d probably be able to understand it better with experience as well.

Don’t let the feeling that you need more information, better gear, the right time, the right circumstances, the right anything be excuses holding you back from what you want. You don’t need to read 50 more articles or blogs on healthy eating to start right now. You don’t need equipment or a trainer to start working on your fitness goals. You don’t need to learn how to build a webpage from scratch to start a blog or online business.

There’s also a real chance that you will fail. Or maybe you’ll figure out that it’s not actually something that you want to do. In either case, it’s better to figure it out sooner rather than later, not waste all that extra time preparing, and move on to the next thing.

How much Good are you willing to give up chasing after a Perfect that may not even be attainable? Get started.

Goals, Practice

Practice Making Habits

Changing habits and creating new habits are both incredibly difficult. It takes a lot of practice, and, at least for me, a lot of failures.
Missteps and setbacks are frustrating, but you just have to keep plugging along until the habit takes hold.

New habits seem to be a little easier for me to form than changing old habits. As an example, making my daily gratitude journal a habit took about a month or so. On the other hand, some of my food habits took years to change. Thankfully, once they started to change, further changes became a little easier.

I’ve found that starting small is much more effective for me. Currently, I’m trying to make writing a daily habit. I’ve been trying off and on for about a year, mostly off. Most of that time, I was setting expectations too high for myself, so looking back it’s not a surprise that I failed.

I made it 6 days in a row last week, then missed Sunday. I was a little disappointed when I went over my daily to do list and didn’t get to check off “write”. But I can either give up or start again, and giving up certainly won’t add to my happiness. I got right back to it on Monday.

As sort of a minimal base, I try to write about my daily runs on the same day. Keeping up with that certainly helps. As much as I would like to dive in and get 1000-2000+ words all toward a couple projects I’m working on, I know that diving into the deep end like that will likely result in another failure and another setback. That said, if I get in the flow and the words start just pouring out, I’m not going to force myself to stop.

Another thing I’m working on, which I have a feeling is going to be a long-term project, is reducing procrastination. This one has been incredibly difficult. I’ve found that I have to start really small. It might be something as simple as telling myself that I will feed my dogs after this Youtube video is over without getting sucked into the next one. I still often struggle with tiny things like that, or telling myself that I’m going to work on packing and shipping things I sold on eBay at a certain time. Then trying not to get wrapped up in something else and rationalizing that it can wait because the post office doesn’t close for a few hours. I’ve become pretty good at rationalizing my procrastination.

Sometimes I find myself thinking that it’s not really that important if I do these little things right away as long as I get to them sometime. (Although, Sigurd certainly won’t let me forget when it’s time to eat.) To overcome the negative self-talk, I have to remind myself that if I hold myself accountable for the little things, it’s going to make it easier to not procrastinate on the bigger, more important things.

It takes practice, sometimes a lot of practice. If you’re having trouble at one level, maybe step back and think about dropping it down a level. It takes some of the pressure off.

As Jim Rohn said, “Make measurable progress in reasonable time.” With my experience in other areas, I know that, as long as I continue stringing together small successes, I’ll get to where I want to be. It may take a week, or it might take a year.