Confessions of a procrastinating perfectionist
No efficiency hack can save me
Sometimes I feel like I’m going to drown in all my to-dos. Most days it feels like a messy juggling act of taking care of the stuff I have to do and then trying to find some time and headspace for the stuff I want to do.
Unfortunately, I also struggle with a lovely combo of being both a procrastinator and perfectionist. I often push off doing things—whether that’s writing this newsletter or organizing my kid’s toys or even responding to an email—until I’ve decided the conditions are just right. I’m not too hot or cold, too hungry or too full, too happy or too grumpy. My horoscope promises that the planets are aligned. And I have a chunk of uninterrupted time when everyone leaves me the hell alone. Then and only then I can successfully tackle the to-do that’s hanging over my head.
I have a hard time accepting this version of myself—the slightly chaotic procrastinating perfectionist. I’m hopelessly optimistic that one day I will find the perfect organizational system to unlock my full productivity potential, and then I will be able fly through my to-do list and not procrastinate for a single minute. All the meetings will end on time, all the technology will work, my kid will sleep to 7 a.m., and when I sit down to write, the words will flow.
At the same time I’m not really looking for efficiency hacks to optimize my life. I do and I don’t want to maximize my time. Mostly, I just want to feel good about what I am doing. And give myself some grace about the stuff that doesn’t get done. It’s not helpful to spiral every time I have a less-than-productive day.
When I was at Fortune, I liked to ask some of the executive women I spoke to what was one thing they had given up doing. I would give them the example of how I stopped trying to grow plants on my balcony. It’s not something I’m good at, and I’d feel like such a failure when the plants inevitably died. When I had a full-time job with a salary, I didn’t feel as bad about the shit I couldn’t get done on my to-do list. “I’m a busy working woman,” I’d think to myself. “Some shit is going to have to slip through the cracks.”