May 8th, 2010 | Personal
Procrastination, thy name is “perfectionism”
I’ve been working on a redesign for Osaka Design for a long time – really much longer than it needed to be. Things just kept popping up – the colour wasn’t exactly right for the font; there was a 1 pixel shift on an image which needed to be taken care of; the wording in this paragraph is okay, but not exactly what I want to convey; I wonder if a picture of my cat would improve the ambiance here. And the list went on and on and on…. Suffice it to say, no matter how many times I pushed that boulder to the top of the hill, it bayed me a fond “Screw you!” and proceeded to roll back down to the base. Damn you gravity.
A couple of months ago, I was having coffee with a good friend of mine, and he told me about a paper he was reading: if memory serves, it was a case study for a psychological journal about the relationship between perfectionism and procrastination. A quick search on the ol’ intertubes lead me to discover that this was a fairly well known connection – you learn something new everyday, I suppose. I did a little reading, nodded that yes, in certain aspects, the profile fit me to a ‘T’, but ultimately filed my newly acquired knowledge under Things-I’ll-Only-Use-In-A-Cutthroat-Game-Of-Trivial-Pursuit.
It all came back to me recently from an unlikely source – 37signals’ new book, Rework. I’ve actually read it a few times now, but one passage in particular struck me on my last read through.
When good enough gets the job done, go for it. It’s way better than wasting resources or, even worse, doing nothing because you can’t afford the complex solution. And remember, you can usually turn good enough into great later.
So, yeah… while things were not perfect (and probably never would be – I’m horribly critical of my own work), the site was more than good enough to get the job done. Better to put myself out there rather than go along with a site design I wasn’t happy with.
And there it is: even without the perfect wallpaper for my Twitter account, a good headshot for my Linked In profile and a couple of CSS issues, the new Osaka Design is launched. And I have to say I’m a lot less stressed for it.
