Many of us hold principles that keep us from pursuing a more productive lifestyle.
For example, one of the most common ones is the belief that increasing productivity, or getting the most out of your time, will decrease the quality of your work, or your ability to do tasks perfectly. In the online program we run to help working professionals develop more productive work behaviors, about half of our participants have agreed with the statement: “I’m sure I could get more done in less time, but the quality of my work would go down.â€
You’ve probably experienced this in action: it’s 5:30 PM and you could probably just hit send on that last deliverable and leave work. But you figure you might as well spend 30 more minutes on it before sending, and you stay a bit later.
Did the extra half hour make that much of a difference? Perhaps, but it’s more likely that it just made you feel more confident in the quality of your work. And so we end up believing that spending more time on our work makes it better.
Read more at:
https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-lie-that-perfectionists-tell-themselves------------
I used to be a perfectionist, till I got older and understood the concept of marginal returns. You think you're doing something till you realize you're just marching round and round in a perfectly right-angled square.
