Is Perfectionism Ruining Your Work-Life Balance?
Perfectionists are those who need everything they do to be done just as they have envisioned it. They create extremely high and unrealistic standards for themselves. Unfortunately, this can get in the way of proper work-life balance.
Productivity tanks when you’re dealing with perfectionism. Instead of doing a job well enough in two hours, you’ll take six hours just to try to get it perfect. This extra time is lost for the sake of an incredibly slight increase in quality.
When you lose all this time trying to make things perfect, that time will be coming out of your personal life. You’ll be spending too much time at work and not enough time with your family and friends.
Perfectionism can be a major source of stress. A lot of the time, the goal you work toward with perfectionism is unattainable. Truly getting something perfect isn’t usually possible anyway, which can be frustrating.
Additionally, the time consumption can stress you out. Even if you don’t get stressed by the actual work, spending hours and hours fighting with work just to get it perfect is going to make you stressed and worried.
In order to avoid being a perfectionist, you need to think about things logistically. If you were to put the quality of your work on a scale from 1 to 100, you might normally finish a job at a 90 or even a 95.
Taking double the time to get the work from a 90 to a 93 isn’t worth it, logically speaking. It’s a waste of time to try to improve on what’s already good and to try to chase an impossible level of perfection.
You end up reaching diminishing returns. Now if you have ample time in your day, and your work-life balance is satisfactory, then you might spend extra time on something. But your goal is to enjoy life.
Instead of digging in your heels, leave the job alone when it’s done well enough and go focus on something else in your life. It might be another separate work project, or it might be something personal, such as your mental health.
Overcoming perfectionism can be hard, because it’s often instilled from a young age. Take baby steps towards being content with slightly imperfect work. Learn to not worry about the idea of achieving perfection.
Once you learn to let go of your perfectionist ideas, you’ll save so much time on your work and be much more productive. In turn, you’ll be able to spend more time working on other things in your life that are important to you.
To your success,
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