Perfectionism is a scourge on my agency

It is damn near impossible for me to even start working on something sometimes. I think a lot of it comes from me wanting to do it right, not half-assing it. It’s funny too, for a long time I think I’ve been at least semi-aware of how my perfectionism stops me from doing things and knowing that imperfect work is sometimes okay too.

Maybe other people have had issues with perfectionism too? How do people get things done? Perhaps I’m just especially picky about what could be done better.

Not that I try to do everything perfectly, though. There are things that I am willing to put down, either because perfection was never the point or because I realize along the way that my standards are impractical. My blog, for example, has several posts that just sit with a tension or nuance. They don’t try to answer it or conclude it, it’s just sitting there waiting to be picked up again once I’ve thought about it some more. Earlier today I updated my blog to include images, and decided to give up on implementing a nicer-looking broken image fallback because I had already spent nearly three hours working on the changes.

What has never consistently worked for me are these habit tracking and task management apps. I think they feel like too much effort to set up and maintain. After a while the reminders stop really giving me the urgency to actually just go do the thing I should do and so I ignore it. Because it tracks how much I do my habits I often get really discouraged seeing missed habits build up for days. A tech solution might not be for me, but then again, I haven’t opened my habit tracker in weeks and it’s not like my habits have improved dramatically.

Hopefully I’ll figure something out.

Note: Funny thing is, I wrote this all about four days ago (October 15) and didn’t publish it until now. I felt like it was missing something, or that it didn’t really address the actual core subject of perfectionism and craftsmanship enough. Maybe the title and subtitle needed to be changed, but I’m just gonna post it because I don’t want to sit on this piece and eventually delete it. Who care’s if it’s poorly titled?