Hosting an online leadership summit is an important event for me and I was slipping the first milestone. I noticed that I was nowhere close to it. I was going in circles with the summit web pages. First, it was the tech stuff, then the design and then the copy. This went on for a few days. I’m stuck, unable to move forward. It’s taking me more time to finish the pages I estimated to complete only a few days. What was going on? Was it a wrong estimate or just the perfectionist in me trying to steal the picture?
I decided to take a step back and look at the situation with a different lens. As a still-recovering perfectionist, I have to be cautious because I am susceptible to ‘perfection sickness’. Hmm… The perfection bug was biting me again! I call it sickness because it makes me feel really sick and tired and frustrated with little progress.
I called on my inner doctor to help me out…
She showed me that the amount of effort put in perfecting the craft did not help move the needle forward, instead, it made me anxious because the work was not done on time. I’m overwhelmed. In fact, exhaustion was leading to poor outcome, the law of diminishing returns.
Did the minute detailing really add value? Heck no! The bug was just keeping me in the stuck zone trying to perfect everything, probably afraid of not maintaining high standards.
She then reminded me of one of my favorite marketing gurus, Seth’s words – ‘Scrappy’ is not the same as ‘crappy’. Ship it while it’s unpolished, it’s better than good enough.
So I had to decide what was good enough for me. I had set only the ‘ceiling’ of high standards but no ‘floor’. Stephen Guise in his great little book How to Be an Imperfectionist, says ‘ceiling’ can quickly work against us (and paralyze us) if we aren’t careful. So we want to have a basic, a minimum standard to meet. I added the floor and measured my work against the floor checklist. A rule of thumb is when it’s 80% done. Voila! The work was not crappy but ‘good enough’.
The floor checklist was an antidote to my perfection sickness. It gave me the courage to ship the ‘scrappy’. I found adding the floor useful to quieten the perfectionist inner critic and make sure I don’t drive myself nuts. 🙂 With the next valuable feedback, I only get an opportunity to make my work even better. It was liberating! So here is my first scrappy draft of the summit registration page!
How about you? Take a moment to think of your most important goal right now… Where can you add the floor and make progress? Do you think you are having issues in terms of productivity? Launch before you are ready because you are never going to see yourself ready.
Aren’t we told that progress is better than perfect?
Until next… Keep smiling!
Archana
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