Managing Perfectionism

Most perfectionists can’t see their standards are unrealistic and bad for them. To find if you’re a perfectionist, ask yourself if your standards:

• ... are higher than those of others.
• ... can be met by you or others.
• ... help or get in the way of you achieving your goals.
• ... can be relaxed without affecting much the end result.

In sports, the drive for perfectionism is a positive force and turn setbacks into opportunities to reflect, learn, and adjust your approach. But regular perfectionists keep revisiting past failures as a form of self-condemnation.

All this does is cause them to raise the bar even higher, increasing the likelihood of failure. Try to see failure as simply a launching place for success, so you can break away from perfectionism.

If a project is at 90%, you’re asking for line-level feedback like typos, glitches, or silly mistakes. At 30%, the reviewer skips over those things (assuming they’ll be looped in later to help with them) and focuses on the broader strokes: structure, strategy, approach.

Using this technique can help curb the socially-prescribed perfectionism in the workplace. It also makes your managers more aware of the status of your projects, and thus less likely to pile more on you.