Procrastination and Perfectionism – A Pernicious Circle

How to become a non-procrastinator in 5 not-so-easy steps?

I know I haven’t written a blog post in a very long time. In my defence, I have been very busy for the past year. I graduated college with a post grad diploma, completed a mandatory internship under a toxic supervisor, finished writing a novel, started my first job and have started querying the novel (and also amassed a respectable number of rejection slips).

So what drove me to write this now? Well, my schedule certainly hasn’t gotten any less grinding. But I guess you could say I had an epiphany. I found (or at least think I found) the answer to a question that has been bugging me for a while now. To fully understand this question and subsequently, its answer, you’d first need to know a bit of background information about my life.

I was a terrible student, particularly in school. In fact, I was so terrible as a student, being bad at academics kind of became my USP – almost a part of my identity. And this was a problem. A terrible, traumatising problem, really. I come from a middle class, Indian family. My family (and my society, really) places a high value on academic achievement. The school you go to, the grades you get, the things that are said about you at parent-teacher meets have very real consequences on the quality of your life, your standing amongst your peer group, the way people see you and perhaps most importantly, the way you see yourself.

It is important to point out, here, that I wanted to be a good student. Wanted it desperately, in fact. I would have given anything to be one. To get good grades and to be praised by my teachers. To make my parents proud. I cannot overemphasize the extent to which I wanted all of that. I wanted it so bad it was almost pathetic.

But for the entirety of my school life, I never achieved it. Hell, I never even came close to achieving it. It was nothing but a mixture of pure, dumb luck, and an aptitude for sounding more knowledgeable than I was (particularly in writing), that kept me from having to repeat a class. Which comes with its own baggage and associated stigmas, but that’s a rant for another time.

My problems with academics were not, however, a problem of aptitude. It wasn’t that I could not understand the course material, it was simply that I could never even bring myself to read it. Nobody understood why I didn’t do better at school – not my parents, not my teachers. Not even the one psychologist that I forced my parents to take me to, in a state of desperation. The thing is, I didn’t understand it either. Why could I not just read the chapter for which I had a test tomorrow? It was as much a mystery to me as it was to anybody else; a fact that to this day, I have not been able to explain to my parents.

Procrastination – the great adversary

Eventually, in high school, I learned about the concept of procrastination. I self-diagnosed as a chronic procrastinator and pretty much accepted that fate. It was a relief, really, to finally have a name, a label for all those years of confusion, despair and self-hatred. I accepted my propensity for self-destructive levels of procrastination and even (in some moments of defensiveness and general dysfunction) gloried in it. And life went on, as it has a tendency to do.

But then, something happened. By the time I had graduated college, my problems with procrastination had diminished significantly. By the time I got my post-grad diploma and stepped into the workforce, they had all but disappeared altogether. I was more productive than I had ever been before in my life.

And don’t get me wrong. I was happy, I was bloody ecstatic about this change. But I didn’t know what had brought it about, and that fact kept bugging me. Not knowing kept me feeling vulnerable. Because if I didn’t know what had caused it the first time and how I had managed to overcome it, what would I do if it ever happened again? Procrastination had made my teenage years a self-perpetuating cycle of misery, self-loathing, stress and fear. I most certainly did not want to repeat that phase again.

And then, it struck me. Just this evening, if I’m to be honest with you. I finally know what had caused the chronic procrastination, and what finally stopped it.

Perfectionism – the invisible villain

The culprit, believe it or not, was a strange kind of destructive perfectionism. I call it strange because I would not, in a million years, have pegged myself for a perfectionist. To me, the word perfectionism brings to mind an image of ambitious, Type A, high-achieving, high-flying, workaholics. I was not, and still am not, any of those things. On the contrary, I am a pretty laid back person whose idea of a fantastic evening is a cup of coffee and a good movie (or a great book). I could not be more Type B if I tried. So how could I be a perfectionist?

Turns out, I was. Well, it would be wrong to say that it was just perfectionism that was the problem. It is also true that I found schoolwork largely boring and I suppose the excessive external pressure that most students are put under also played a role. But I’ll tell you why I think perfectionism was the biggest culprit in causing and perpetuating my chronic procrastination.

So, say I have a test next week and the syllabus consists of seven chapters. I would create an exact schedule for the next seven days in order to prepare for this test. I would map out my exact study plan, decide on my schedule for reading, revision, practice and so forth. Then, I would begin.

The thing was, this entire master plan consisted of a number of sub-plans. When I would begin each chapter, when I would end it, when I would revise, etc. And if I failed to achieve any one of these goals, (which I inevitably did as I put so much pressure on myself), I would feel compelled to start all over again. Or to give up altogether. Or to start again the next day, when of course the same problem would repeat itself. This was my perfectionism sabotaging me, without me even realising it. I was completely and utterly unaware of this entire subconscious process, that I went through over and over again for several years.

My perfectionism told me that if I couldn’t follow a study plan perfectly, I couldn’t study at all. And because this perfection was so difficult to achieve, my brain kept delaying it as much as possible, pulling me away to do other things.

And when I did finally get around to studying, the same miserable cycle would repeat itself. I would try to study, to get it all exactly right, follow the plan to the letter. And then, inevitably, I would fail to achieve one of those goals and the entire thing would be sent into a tailspin and I would feel compelled to start over again or to abandon the process altogether. Which is what I did, and paid the price for it for almost the entirety of my academic life. And not just academically either, but socially and emotionally as well, which I would say had a much more lasting effect than any academic failures that I experienced during the period.

It amazes me how this could have happened so consistently, and for so many years, without me being aware of it in any way whatsoever. And because I wasn’t aware of it, I didn’t know how to deal with it or overcome it. You can’t, after all, fight an enemy that you don’t even know exists.

So what changed?

And now, we come to the reason why I am writing this in the first place. To tell you (my understanding of) how I finally overcame my procrastination problem. I would like to say that for the longest time, I was as unaware of my recovery as I had been of the disease itself. It was not until just a few months ago that I finally noticed the fact that, hey! I had completed my education, managed to get myself a cash award for academic excellence, finished writing a novel, landed a job and was doing reasonably well at said job.  I was being more productive than I had ever been before and it didn’t even feel like I was swimming against a tsunami. So, what the hell changed?

What changed is that on the long and tortuous road to adulthood, I came across, and almost unconsciously implemented, some amazing pearls of wisdom. Five of them, to be exact. I’ll try and explain them below, in no particular order.

1.       Give yourself the freedom to fail

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about them in any particular order, but this is indubitably the most important one. And so I am listing it first. If you remember nothing of this post, do remember this. Because failure is inevitable. It happens to everyone, no matter how safe you play it. You will fail. A person who has never failed is a person who has never aimed for anything but the most low-hanging fruits, and even that is not a fool-proof strategy.

So to fail or not to fail is not within our control. Failure, like the common cold, is something that happens to almost everybody at one point or another. The only thing we can control, then, is how we deal with failure.

In school, my perfectionism made me deal with failure by mentally punishing myself. By making me start the project over again or by avoiding it altogether. And that is what led to my chronic procrastination. The fact that I could not forgive myself for failing, and tried to subconsciously escape the pain of it by simply not trying in the first place. After all, you can’t fail at something you never did.

I guess as I got older, I learned to be kinder to myself. I accepted the fact that I would fail; not once, but over and over again. And that that was alright, so long as I kept trying. I learned to be proud of every rejection letter I received for my novel. Because hell, they were physical (or at least electronic) proof of the fact that I tried. And that brings me to my next point…

2.       Do your worst work

I read this on an online forum, though I have now forgotten what the forum was for. It’s true when you think about it, though, isn’t it? The worst book that you could possibly write is still better than the perfect book that never gets written. Doing your worst work is better than doing nothing in the hope of eventual perfection, which is what I basically did for the majority of my academic career. In the pursuit of that elusive master plan, I ended up spending a whole bunch of time doing absolutely nothing. Because not only could I not study, I couldn’t do anything else with that time either, as all the while I was feeling guilty for not studying. So I just spent hour after hour mired in guilt, hopelessness and an endless series of llama videos (which weren’t so bad).

Additionally, when you give yourself the mental permission to do your worst work, guess what happens? The pressure lifts. The stress vanishes. It becomes easier to get into the flow of whatever it is that you are doing. And the end result is rarely as bad as you thought it would be. And if it is? Well, it’s still infinitely better than nothing. Giving myself permission to do my worst work was probably the single best thing I did for my productivity in my entire life.

3.     Go one step at a time

Another thing that always triggered my procrastination, as I now realise, was envisioning the entirety of a large project. Completing an entire syllabus, writing a whole book, acing the finals. You get the picture. These huge goals seemed like mountains that were impossible to climb; a dark tunnel to which there was no end in sight. What was needed was a reframing of the problem, which I didn’t do because I wasn’t consciously aware of the problem at the time. The point is, writing a whole book only seems hard if you think of it as being a whole book. What if you thought of it as a whole lot of 500-word scenes?

You didn’t have to write all the scenes. You just had to write one. And then, when you were done with that, you just had to write one more. Anyone with a keyboard can type out 500 words. And remember, they don’t have to be 500 perfect words. They can be 500 of the worst words you have ever written, and that would be a victory too. Because you have given yourself the permission to do your worst work.

And you can miss writing your 500 words one day, and that would be perfectly fine. It doesn’t mean that you have to start over or give up on the project. You can write it the next day. Or the night after that. Because remember, you have given yourself the freedom to fail, and to keep going even after you have failed. So really, all that you have to do is put one foot in front of the other. Type the word after the last one. Read the page after the last one. And simply doing that makes you a winner.

4.       Take tiny bites

This point is, in a way, an extension of the last one. That is to say that even when I was taking one step at a time, setting myself big interim goals still tripped me up and triggered my procrastination. If I promised myself that I would write one whole scene in an evening, or read an entire chapter, then I felt a need to keep that promise. Now these goals weren’t too hard, and most of the time I would have no trouble completing them. But we’re all human, and sometimes, life happens. You get caught up on YouTube or find yourself incapable of hanging up on a distraught friend with too much alcohol in her system. And then you fail to reach that seemingly reasonable goal and boom! There goes the perfectionism fuelled procrastination monster again.

The way I got around this was to set goals that were so ridiculously easy, they would be impossible to miss. Read one page. Write a hundred words. So on and so forth. And when I was done with that goal, if I still had time, I would set myself another ridiculously easy goal. Read the next page. Write another hundred words. So even if one day I found myself with just 15 minutes of free time before bedtime, I still had enough time to achieve my goals and feel like I had taken one step forward, no matter how tiny. Taking really tiny bites, setting up laughably easy goals, are how you make a dent on an impossibly large problem.

5.       The next day is the first day of the rest of your life

I heard this one on a Ted Talk video. See? Those hours of browsing aimlessly through YouTube weren’t a complete waste after all! Well, I took the advice to its logical conclusion. The next minute is the first minute of the rest of your life.

One of my main problems with procrastination was that if I did one thing wrong, if I missed a single goal, that mistake or failure cast a long shadow over the rest of the project. So I would feel like since I have gotten this particular thing wrong, I will inevitably get the rest of it wrong too. This thought process put me under undue stress and again, made me want to avoid the whole thing all together. If I messed up once, I messed up the whole thing. I would feel like I’ll have to start the whole thing over again or just put the project on hiatus and try again the next day, or the next week. I simply could not grasp the concept of cutting your losses and moving on.

But what if every new minute was an opportunity for a new beginning? I didn’t have to put off rectifying my mistake for a whole new day. I had a whole new minute waiting for me at the end of sixty seconds. Everything that happened before the next minute is irrelevant, the problems of another time. The next minute is literally the first one to the rest of your life. Even if you have made an absolute mess of your life up until the last minute, that baggage does not have to carry over to the next minute. With every minute that passes, you can choose to start a whole new narrative for the rest of your life. The failures and successes of the past are irrelevant.

It is only the future that matters. To think of the next moment as the first one of the rest of your life is the best way I have found to cut my losses and shed the baggage of past mistakes, both recent and old. I mean sure, I made some mistakes in the past. But I don’t have to repeat them in this new phase of my life. If you train yourself to think like this, every moment can be a new beginning, a whole new era. And the perfectionism monster can’t tell you you’re a loser for past mistakes and failures.

Bonus:

This is not directly related to the procrastination problem, but it is another pearl of pithy wisdom that I heartily believe in, and that has had a transformative effect on how I view the world and live my life.

-          Don’t think for more than five minutes about something that won’t matter after five years.

Practice Practice Practice

Here’s the thing, though. All of these are easier said than done. Simply reading about the solution to a problem won’t help you get rid of it. That’s just the first step, though an important one. You have to train your mind to believe in all of these points, to implement them and to live by them even when it seems impossibly hard. And you won’t succeed the first time. The procrastination monster doesn’t give up that easy, and perfectionism sticketh closer than a brother.

But here’s the thing. That’s ok. Because you have the universe’s permission to fail, and even the worst attempt at recovery is better than none. You can simply implement one of these remedies at a time; you don’t have to do them all at once. And you can break them up into smaller chunks if that helps you process the entire thing better. And if you ever slip up and go back to your old, procrastinating ways? Well, you can wipe the slate clean and start over again the very next minute. Because, after all, what better way to kick off the first minute of the rest of your life?

Want my advice? Practice practice practice. If you do it enough times, it will become second nature. Believe me, it really does get easier with time. And practice.

P.S. This blog post, in all probability, is not perfect. But if it turns out to be even marginally useful to even a single person that reads it, then in my opinion it’s a great, roaring success.

See? That’s the power of setting teeny goals. You improve your chances of reaching them!