id: mop title: The Myth of Perfection previous: thestart next: foundation date: 2021-01-15 ---

## The Myth of Perfection

I am not sure if you have had this problem, maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. It seems to me something that plagues many of us and is often reinforced by our environment. It is expecting perfection from ourselves when we are fundamentally imperfect.

I often try to fit too much in a day. Either planning it too granularly down to 15 minute intervals, or just making an unreasonably long list of things to get done. They could get done in a day for sure if I was a machine. I am not however and life is too variable to plan that way, then when I fail at getting something done, something unforeseen happens and my schedule falls apart, or I just did not properly estimate how long something would take me I feel terrible.

Striving to do more is a good thing I think. We have limited time and it takes work to realise our dreams, however looking only to the future is a sure way to be miserable in the present. I struggle with this. I spend most of my time working towards some future reward, goal, or achievement, I don’t plan my schedule around things that make me feel good or allow me to recuperate. When I inevitably need some time to decompress I feel guilty for taking it.

This is something I have been working on recently. Giving myself more space to make mistakes and more time to enjoy the moment. It is hard and I still feel like I should be doing more but I try to do it anyway in the hopes that over time I will accept it. Taking time for myself does allow me to work harder but it never feels that way at the time.

In the fantastic book Deep Work by Cal Newport he speaks to the need to schedule downtime, decide in advance and write it into your calendar to give yourself space. It is often the case that our mind keeps working on a problem when we are no longer directly focussed on it, the eureka moment in the shower or the solution that pops into your head as you are falling asleep. By never taking the step back from the work we block out that diffuse thinking that allows for such intuitive leaps. He also strongly advises having a cutoff time for the work day. A time past which no work is allowed.

I have school and a number of projects including this blog that I am working on currently. It makes it hard to back away, it also means that at any point work is just a few steps away. I try to implement a cutoff, but when it gets to that point and my list has only a few items left I more often than not keep working. Then I stay up later to have a little time to decompress and it makes it harder to get up the next morning.

This is doubly painful as it is much easier to schedule the earlier parts of the day then later. People are just waking up and you have not had so much time for things to deviate from the plan. If I am up at 5am I can often fairly solidly follow my schedule until 1 or 2pm, that is 8-9 hours of solid productive time before things begin to fall apart. If I need to run errands, have a short nap, or do any number of other things they can fit into this afternoon time and still give me a few more hours of work before I try to call the day at 5 or 6pm.

If I stay up late and get up later it is much harder to get started. The gym is busy, the world is loud and I am already feeling bad for turning off my alarm. I often have a broken schedule from the start which makes me work later, get less done, and feel worse. The cycle repeats.

I feel like for the most part this is one of the most predominant stresses in my day to day life. I can’t remember a day where I have not gone to bed feeling like I could have done more. I am also aware that this is likely one of the main changes that I could make to improve both my quality of life and productivity.

When looking at it in the short term it seems counter intuitive, but in the long term a more reliably planned routine including time for rest and relaxation will reduce burnout and allow me to try and find what that ideal level of work is that I can accomplish in a day. I feel like my oscillations around this amount are getting smaller. I used to swing far into trying to get far too much done, and then crashing to getting almost nothing done for a number of days. The extremes are now less extreme and I hope that over time it can settle completely into a steady stream of productivity.

Thank you for reading.