Hi, I am Annalyce, I am currently in my first year here at OSU. I am a finance major and I am minoring in general psychology. This semester is my first semester of college and keeping my perfectionist mindset throughout high school was very exhausting and made me very burnt out. I know that if I want to succeed in college, I need to deconstruct this perfectionist mindset and reduce burnout.
Book and Connection to Goals
I chose the book The Joy of Imperfection. After reading several summaries of the book, I thought that this book would be very useful in helping me achieve my goals. These summaries describe overcoming your inner critics, embracing imperfection, and eliminating the fear of failure through stimulating exercises. These are connected to my goals because the book provides many strategies to encourage active participation to slowly decrease one’s perfectionism.
Goal
One goal I had for this semester was to decrease my perfectionism. I will complete this by spending at least 30 minutes a day on myself to help decrease my perfectionism, increase my motivation and decrease burnout.
Negative Effects of Perfectionism
Perfectionism can have many negative effects both short-term and long-term. Perfectionism has been linked to many deeper mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, and panic attacks. It also causes increases in stress and people-pleasing as well as the inability to say no and delegate tasks. Perfectionists also tend to work on tasks until they are perfect, (Zahariades, 2017, p.145). All of these aspects can lead to burnout because perfectionism is not a sustainable mindset.
Strategies and Tracking
Strategy one: “Gamify” your to-do list.
I chose this strategy because it seemed like a fun exercise to try. This strategy is connected to my goal because the book says that “gamifying” a to-do list “reduces the tedium of working on mundane tasks,” (Zahariades, 2017, p. 150). Making the tasks more enjoyable to complete this exercise helps to shift a perfectionist mindset because it shifts your focus and priority from flawless to efficiency. In the short term, this leads to increases in motivation and decreases in burnout while actively working to decrease perfectionism in the long term.
Strategy one: Tracking
To “gamify” your to-do list you assign every task a challenge and a reward. If you do the challenge you get the reward.
In my opinion, this strategy was very effective. This allowed me to space out completing my work and taking time for myself. For many of my longer assignments, my reward was to spend 30 minutes doing something for myself. The goal of this method is to reduce the amount of time spent making projects “perfect.” This helped me to make myself more efficient while also allowing me to have more time to spend on myself. This allowed me to complete my goal of taking that time for myself but scheduling it in my day as a reward for doing something productive.
One obstacle was coming up with different rewards. This was difficult because I could only think of a few different options. I managed this by shuffling through the different options for each day so that the rewards while similar were not repeated every day.
Strategy two: Setting time limits.
I chose this strategy because I tend to spend significant amounts of time editing assignments to make sure that they are perfect, so this exercise seemed like a great way to help me overcome my inner critic. This is connected to my goal because the purpose of this exercise is to deconstruct the perfectionist mindset by teaching that “good enough” will suffice. Setting time limits helps to prevent wasting time by telling your brain that the task is “good enough” and it is time to walk away. Which reduces your inner critic by showing you that perfect is not the expectation.
Strategy Two: Tracking
For this strategy, you create a daily to-do list and then assign a time limit to each task when the time is up you need to move on to a different task.
This was also an effective strategy for me. It forced me to focus on the task at hand since there was a time limit involved. This productivity increase helped me to be more efficient with my work while also limiting the amount of time I spent working.
Underestimating how much time a task would take was a little bit of a challenge. I address this challenge by using the extra time that I had budgeted for other assignments to complete the projects that I underestimated.
Pictured here is how much time I spent on myself each day of tracking since the goal was to devote more time to myself.
Both strategies helped me work toward my goal because they helped me plan out my time as well as how much work I would do in a day. By limiting the amount of work I was doing I became more efficient and made time for myself. One strategy also allowed me to plan rewards into my day which also helped me to schedule personal time.
Takeaways
- I learned that decreasing perfectionism is a marathon and not a sprint. As you implement these strategies into your life you will see the small changes turn into results.
- I also learned that perfectionism is all in your head. To correct this over time, you must remind yourself of a few key insights constantly: Give yourself permission to make mistakes, take risks, and remind yourself that no one is paying that much attention.
- Perfect is not the standard, “good enough” is. Remember perfectionism is not sustainable once you deconstruct these thoughts you will be happier.
The key advice that I would like to share is that “You’re more likely to achieve greatness as a result of your imperfections than despite them,” (Zahariades, 2017, p.156). This means that you are more likely to be successful when you are not focusing on being perfect. This quote really stuck with me because it is a very important reminder for any perfectionist.
References
Zahariades, D. (2017). The Joy of Imperfection: A stress-free guide to silencing your inner critic, conquering perfectionism, and becoming the best version of yourself! Art Of Productivity.