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Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

solvingprocrastination.com

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Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#131

Post by norir »

GuB-42 wrote: post #60
sylware wrote: post #6

As a public open source (yep, open source can be private) programmer (currently x86_64 assembly), and I am very aware of this pitfall. It is very important to move forward in code, because you cannot predict how will actually end up a complex program: you need to have all the (sane) features in to actually know. Since code is all about trade-offs, there is "no perfect". You have to be carefull at avoiding falling int…

Isn't assembly programming already a form of perfectionism in itself. Compilers do the job well enough 99.9% of the times. If you are in the 0.1% where writing assembly is justified, you are probably also expected to put many, many times more effort on details most programmers don't care or even don't know about.

Yes, I think it's even less than 0.1%. Assembly should mostly be written as a target for a compiler backend or to inline a hotspot only when it is proven that the compiler can't do it for you. Very few are in either of these two situations outside of artificial environments like a class.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#132

Post by sylware »

GuB-42 wrote: post #60
sylware wrote: post #6

As a public open source (yep, open source can be private) programmer (currently x86_64 assembly), and I am very aware of this pitfall. It is very important to move forward in code, because you cannot predict how will actually end up a complex program: you need to have all the (sane) features in to actually know. Since code is all about trade-offs, there is "no perfect". You have to be carefull at avoiding falling int…

Isn't assembly programming already a form of perfectionism in itself. Compilers do the job well enough 99.9% of the times. If you are in the 0.1% where writing assembly is justified, you are probably also expected to put many, many times more effort on details most programmers don't care or even don't know about.

Just to be independent from those grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex compilers(gcc|clang/llvm), justify the additional amount of work for myself.

Not to mention that from the perspective of the life cycle of tons of system software components out there, the actual coding is not that much.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#133

Post by groestl »

gloryjulio wrote: post #106
kthejoker2 wrote: post #100

I probably have a whole personal blog of my own on the topic, dear as it is to my soul. My two main pieces of advice: The bar is very very low, and share your burden quickly. 99 times out of 100 you are way overestimating the value of what you're delivering and people's expectations for it, and underestimating the value of time i.e. shipping quickly. I've turned in so many things I'm not happy with and gotten a "this…

> 99 times out of 100 you are way overestimating the value of what you're delivering and people's expectations for it, and underestimating the value of time i.e. shipping quickly. Agree with this. Shipping is the most important quality. The faster you ship the faster you would be enjoying anything

> Shipping is the most important quality.

So.. Can you trick yourself into directing the perfectionism into shipping fastest?

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#134

Post by sjfjsjdjwvwvc »

jimmydddd wrote: post #121
sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #23

„ We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no…

When in high school, I returned home after a ski weekend with friends. When I returned home, my relatives, who didn't ski, asked if I fell at all during the weekend. I remarked that I had, especially while navigating some expert trails. They consoled me saying "that's OK, maybe you'll do better next time." I was confused at first until I realized that they thought of falling as a tragic outcome instead of a natural p…

Probably mostly a function of them having no idea what skiing is like. If you never fall you either only use boring routes or ski very slowly - or you are professional skier and have such a breakneck speed you can’t fall (but even then it happens looking at Schumacher)

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#135

Post by sylware »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #15
sylware wrote: post #6

As a public open source (yep, open source can be private) programmer (currently x86_64 assembly), and I am very aware of this pitfall. It is very important to move forward in code, because you cannot predict how will actually end up a complex program: you need to have all the (sane) features in to actually know. Since code is all about trade-offs, there is "no perfect". You have to be carefull at avoiding falling int…

Pardon the tangent, but could you provide a link to that project? I'm curious to see why something like printf is worth writing in assembly.

As I said in my post, I did not release it yet, and it will be very incomplete. But I am not alone, and some did assembly written printf like functions (gogol).

The actual real way to work around the inappropriate complexity of that function is to remove it and switch to a brutal "put string" with string conversion functions (with space allocated on the stack). In the end it would be not that much more work in most cases, then in the end I may not even use my assembly code, but lower some printf function usage to what I said.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#136

Post by garrickvanburen »

groestl wrote: post #133
gloryjulio wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99 times out of 100 you are way overestimating the value of what you're delivering and people's expectations for it, and underestimating the value of time i.e. shipping quickly. Agree with this. Shipping is the most important quality. The faster you ship the faster you would be enjoying anything

> Shipping is the most important quality. So.. Can you trick yourself into directing the perfectionism into shipping fastest?

The best I’ve been able to do is: if perfection == high quality, then shipping smaller iterations faster is the most cost-effective means of improving quality.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#137

Post by aatd86 »

It's a correlation, not a causation, in my experience.

It's likely that the brain chooses the path of least resistance toward dopamine.

Sometimes, just choosing to not be lazy clears it because then not being lazy and doing the darn thing provides enough of a dopamine hit in itself.

It can be changed consciously.

There is also the fear of the unk own but one has to then know that no matter what, they will figure it out. That can be a self-confidence issue. Related to the first point still.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#138

Post by tamimio »

Fantastic article, I’m perfectionist to the bones, and as the article states, it does cause procrastination for the “personal” tasks I have (one time it took me 3months to perfect a resume, and the same reason why my personal site is not yet complete), however, for work related, I do not procrastinate but I ended up overworking extra hours from my personal time to perfect the little details about whatever I’m doing, mostly details no one notices except me!

> Forgive yourself for past procrastination

And this is an important point too, for the personal tasks and especially when some time passes due to procrastination without doing the task, it gets even harder to get back into the tasks simply thinking “if I didn’t procrastinate I would have done by now..” and it demoralizes me more and never start that said task..

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#139

Post by jokoon »

getlawgdon wrote: post #43
jokoon wrote: post #30

there's nothing wrong with procrastination doctors say people work too much, and there's an epidemic of burnout homo sapiens are not made to work and feel guilty when they don't complete tasks it's a problem of work culture and productivism, nothing else

So we are not in fact what we have made ourselves? What are we then? What are we supposed to be?

you cannot turn mammals into efficient obedient workers and expect them to have a sane mental health.

we're mammals with inflated brains, anxiety and depression, and it's too soon since we were hunter gatherers living in caves, we barely started working in cubicles and that's a small sample of the population.

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