Procrastination is the sweet kill pill

Just heard today that "chronic perfectionists are classic procrastinators." And I agree to that because I learned that the hard way while doing programming in a computer science language. Because I always worried about typing in the most optimized code with the proper comments, descriptive variables and function names, and factoring the methods and classes appropriately, I ended up wasting so much time and also delaying beginning to write the code in the first place. I compared myself with other colleagues who wouldn't give a rat's ass thinking about the nomenclature or factoring the code but reached the end result soon. Basically, when you take off the perfectionist's hat and take up the result-oriented approach, you will not get it appealing but you will get it done. And you have all the time remaining in the world to get it right afterwards. Definitely there has to be some mindfulness about getting it right while you are working on it so that your approach has perfectionism built into it. So in a nut-shell, your mindset should be result-oriented and your act should be smart and artistic.

I had a very connected dream the other night reinforcing this fear within me that I am chronically perfectionist. The dream went like this. That I am a part of a team of students who are studying in a class and the class plans a field trip to a local planetarium. The organization of the event is divided among students, with the arrangement of lunch assigned to a lady, acquisitions of tickets to a boy, and facilitation of transportation put up for election. I campaign aggressively to get the votes for arranging the transportation because I fervidly wanted to save our class valuable amount of time. I pitched that instead of going for bus, I will arrange to have us picked up and dropped off through private cabs and will end up saving us atleast 1 hour of working time. I became the favorite and was elected. I thus began to jot down my plan. I decided to go with the taxi company, Uber, to have students picked up and dropped off. I planned to have every one invite others to use Uber from a new account so both the invitee and inviter gets $30 off their first trip, which will make the first trip essentially free for everyone. We would further have 3 people ride the taxi at the same time, which would ensure that third of the class takes the cab 1 way and the other third pays for the way back and the remaining third population rides free. And if we can have 4 people ride the same taxi, we have a possibility of getting the same thing done with the $30 credit being saved for almost half of the class with half of the class paying for the other half. In this way, if some people have even used the taxi, we can still have the entire trip done for free by relying on those extra people in the model.

The concept seems involved at first but works out well and I end up taking till the morning of the actual event date to come up with this concept in the dream. Now I am all set, but the time has almost run out for me to delegate the arrangement of the Uber service. This plan actually involves requesting half of the population to send email invites to the other half and then having the invited half to register for Uber and then request the taxi. But everyone is busy getting ready for the trip and some people have even come to the departing spot. Only 2 hours are left and all of this needs to be done. I didn't even request other people to help me out in encouraging others to do it, collected people's email addresses and checked Uber's availability. Even the time for reserving the bus in advance has passed. And if I even deliver a bus at the end, it won't be any thing unique and I won't end up fulfilling my promise of saving everyone money and introducing a novelty.

Essentially, I got screwed by coming up with the perfect plan to save everyone money and overlooking the result-oriented approach. A dream explained to me my problem with the simplest of example by putting me in the shoe of an organizer of a low-stake but high-accountability task. If I could properly handle the perfectionist within me, always keep the goal of delivering before me rather than delivering best, then I can succeed in real life. An artist within you often times stands between you and your goal!