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Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

solvingprocrastination.com

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Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#201

Post by protoman3000 »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #185
Teever wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are possibilities but I think you missed a much more likely one -- they're just bullies who like to pick on people.

That falls under the "feeling superior" bucket. And like others have said it doesn't explain bias towards certain people.

Yes it could. The boss seems to show strong tendencies of narcissism. Narcissists gather so called “flying monkeys” around them which fuel their sense of superiority and they bind them through various techniques to them (until they are also discarded). In this case the narcissist the PowerPoint-mockup people are these flying monkeys, feeding the narcissist all the grandiose ideas and it gives the narcissist a high for going towards that idea - similar how somebody just announcing they will do a hard task, e.g. stop smoking will make somebody feel good immediately before even reaching that goal.

Then, the people to whom the actual task of implementing it was left can’t deliver the grandiose perfectionist idea, and the narcissistic boss can and actually wants to fiercely abuse their power over them in order to feed on the high of superiority and control over them. It’s the perfect position for this kind of person, they can feel high all the time (eventually the tolerance will kick in and the boss must leave though but this can take some time).

Organization-wise it’s a bad boss really. It’s the job of the creatives to come up with great ideas, then the boss should moderate that working together with the feedback from the implementers. Instead the boss is due to personal weakness too suggestible against the creatives and puts the damage of his own making on to the team with bullying.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#202

Post by deepfriedchokes »

Aurornis wrote: post #88

I developed a bad case of perfectionism-procrastination after working for a toxic boss. It didn't matter how polished our product was, he'd find a way to tear it apart. When he'd have a bad day, he'd start picking apart a random team's product. "Unbelievable!" he'd say in Slack, dropping a screen recording of the app that showed something we were supposed to be embarrassed about. It could be that the app took 3 secon…

This is psychological abuse. Let’s start calling it what it is.

Corporations should start screening for personalities like this. They’re sick, and often seek out positions of power.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#203

Post by worklaptopacct »

Aurornis wrote: post #88

I developed a bad case of perfectionism-procrastination after working for a toxic boss. It didn't matter how polished our product was, he'd find a way to tear it apart. When he'd have a bad day, he'd start picking apart a random team's product. "Unbelievable!" he'd say in Slack, dropping a screen recording of the app that showed something we were supposed to be embarrassed about. It could be that the app took 3 secon…

I have recognized at some point that I had something similar, but originating in my childhood. Most of the time I would be told to do something vague (e.g. clean your room), and no matter how much did I do, the feedback was usually negative (e.g. "You call this done?"), following with me getting grounded. Eventually, I've developed a mindset that told me that there's no point in trying, because it's impossible to do things properly. This has spread out into personal interests as well - I would give up quickly, because what's the point?

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#204

Post by Noumenon72 »

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…

> One specific thing I did that helped a few years ago at my precious company was I told my team, wrote in my email signature, ran a small study group, etc. On grit, procrastination, and "growth mindset" and just made a very intentional effort to tell people how I struggled with this problem.

What did you write in your email signature?

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#205

Post by the_cat_kittles »

Aurornis wrote: post #88

I developed a bad case of perfectionism-procrastination after working for a toxic boss. It didn't matter how polished our product was, he'd find a way to tear it apart. When he'd have a bad day, he'd start picking apart a random team's product. "Unbelievable!" he'd say in Slack, dropping a screen recording of the app that showed something we were supposed to be embarrassed about. It could be that the app took 3 secon…

im still thinking about this because its so fundamental. it applies in almost everything. think about how many times people have called professional athletes stupid or bad. it happens all the time because the mistakes are unambiguous. but the coaches have a much longer grace period before people generally decide they are bad. when a musician messes up a piece everyone cringes and lots of people probably think that person is a failure even though they are playing at a level less than a tenth of one percent of people reach. in any discipline that can be (more or less) directly measured, lots of people perceive the people doing those disciplines to be more incompetent because their mistakes are more easily visible.

when someone who is like your old boss (i think a huge percentage of people are) finds themselves in a situation where their mistakes are unambiguous and obvious they panic and have an identity crisis. most people do not live with the accountability of their mistakes like people who make and do things with unambiguous results. it would be great if more people did, but in a way, thats the whole point of those "ideas" / bullshit jobs, to insulate you from your mistakes.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#206

Post by pjerem »

skeaker wrote: post #123
pjerem wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends, do you define endless scrolling as boredom ? Because I think it’s not.

That's not what the post above you is talking about. "Endless scrolling" was never even mentioned

I know, I was just asking.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#208

Post by ChildOfChaos »

I agree, procrastination to me seems like an emotional problem, it's not a time management problem. I see a lot of young people these days seem to think they need the right app or secret system to fix there issues, I see them asking questions on reddit blaming the todo list app they are using for not getting things done.

The thing to me seems, that doing anything has a high cost, that the mind wants to protect us from that, doing nothing is safer, I think it's that system that comes in to protect us.

If we do something, it might be disappointing, it might not be as we expect. Even small things, order something from amazon, you have to wait in to get it, the delivery might get messed up, it might be the wrong thing, it might not work etc, doing something requires more doing, it increases the changes of frustration/annoying things to happen, when doing noting often seems like it doesn't cause much issue. This is perhaps why even the smaller tasks are an issue, because the downsides of not doing it are less apparent. It's no wonder we want to procrastinate.

The trick I think is to meditate on the idea of momento mori, as the stoics did, remember your time here is limited and also reflect on the negative of not having done or achieved things, because the mind automatically considers the negative of doing something and wants to protect you from that.

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#209

Post by treszkai »

whstl wrote: post #196
jopsen wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shipping is the most important quality. There is something to be said for the good old days when we modified PHP files in an editor over FTP :) Never done it professionally. But developing in production would make me ship faster, and using php would probably limit my tendency to make gold plated solutions.

In my C# days, before CI/CD was fashionable, the pinnacle for me was using the "Deploy" button that would compile, run some tests and then deploy. Got a bug? Fix in 5 minutes. Got a typo? Seconds. Code and software quality was surprisingly better than it is today. Today? In a process heavy company with Jira, PMs and QA it can become a week-long affair, unless I (the lead developer) bypass parts of the process. The pe…

> Come to think of it, perfectionism never really leads to anything of quality.

TeX stood the test of time and it was released as close to perfection as it gets in non-life-critical software. (One could argue it wasn’t perfectionism at work, but sound top-down design.)

Re: Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

#210

Post by austin-cheney »

exolymph wrote: post #167
austin-cheney wrote: post #62

The article hints at psychology and then fails to dive into it. Perfectionism, only when intentionally and cognitively executed in an orderly fashion, is linked to extremely high consciousness and extremely high consciousness when not properly managed is highly correlated with anxiety. The slang for this is anal-retentive . This becomes complicated because anxiety is most typically concerned with high measures of neu…

*conscientiousness, distinct from consciousness :)

Yes!! I have made this spelling mistake before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness
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