Time Management Tip: Follow These Tips to Overcome the Perfectionist Stumbling Block
Being a perfectionist is a blessing and a curse. When quality and accuracy are at a premium you can be counted on to deliver, it’s just a matter of when you will deliver. You can never live up to your own extremely high standards and you drive others nuts with your meticulous concern over every little detail. A happy medium between your own standards for perfection and the level of perfection required for the task at hand will help you to enjoy better time management.
A great way to get better time management for a project is to map out the entire project before starting. Start with a blank piece of paper putting the project in the center and then identify all the tasks, obstacles, and outputs needed. You’ll love this part because you get to think of every detail from the onset.
Set standards for the final results. As part of your mapping process identify the ultimate result the project needs. Don’t allow yourself to set standards that you aren’t 100% confident that you can achieve right now with the time, talents, and resources you have at your disposal. When you set standards that are above your capabilities you are just setting yourself up for a time management fiasco.
Verify the standards you’ve set aren’t higher than the value. Setting standards higher than the value was a huge mistake that many manufacturers made. Yes, a manufacturer can make a part with a very high tolerance, but if the customer isn’t willing to pay extra for this level of tolerance it’s poor time management and a costly mistake. You want to make sure that the standards you’ve set don’t exceed the value the customer is willing to pay for it in terms of their time, talents, and treasure.
Set a time frame for completion of the project. Make the time frame realistic so that you don’t have to have everything go perfectly in order to hit your deadline. A good time management tip is to always allow a little slack time with any project or appointment. You also want to make sure that you hold yourself accountable to your deadline.
Finish the project, get feedback, and make adaptations for the next version. Making yourself finish the project and getting feedback is really important for effective time management. With good feedback you will be able to make improvements that are really valuable to your customer, whether they be coworkers or family and friends; that you may not have thought about without their feedback. Then make adaptations and improvements to the project for the next time.
What if there isn’t a next time? Well there may not be a next time, but there won’t be a first time either if you allow your need for perfection to keep the project from completion. Expecting perfection places a lot of unnecessary stress on you, and for what? Consider this, which is, worse stressing out trying to get everything perfect or doing your best and going with that and having it fall short of your standards? The choice is yours.
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