I've blogged before about my (selective) perfectionism, and how it can sometimes hold me back from getting things done. Needing to get things juuuuust right can really be paralyzing sometimes, because all the work it takes to do something perfectly can seem really overwhelming at the beginning of the task. Please don't get the wrong idea about me, I'm not a neat-freak or anything -- heck no -- but there are certain things that I just can't seem to stop tinkering with until they're done in some sort of optimal way.
Writing is a great example. It's hard to start even something simple like this blog without feeling like I know where it's going, and that where it's going is going to be good. The problem with that mindset, of course, is that sometimes you have to get started before you know where something is going to go.
Moving seems to highlight this problem for me. The early stages of packing are pretty easy because I can sort of plan ahead and put things together in a way that makes sense. As I mentioned in a recent blog, I've moved about 16 times as an adult, so I've learned that packing semi-intelligently to start with makes things much easier on the unpacking side. But after a certain point, when the house is filling up with boxes, time and space are limited and it's no longer possible to match up everything by room, level of importance AND box size required.
At this particular point in the process, the smart thing to do is just to get things boxed and ready to go quickly, and maybe sacrifice the perfect system I started out using in favor of... well, getting it done. But it's hard to give up on your ideal way of doing things, even for practicality's sake. So I spend less time efficiently packing, and more time staring haplessly around the various rooms, trying to figure out how to combine one thing from each of seven rooms into a workable box that will even sort of make sense when I unpack it on the other end.
Technology isn't always helpful for this particular brand of perfectionism. E-mail gives me way too long to edit communications before sending them, which means something that might've been a 3-minute voice message, or even a 10-minute live conversation, can actually take half an hour or far longer to write, read, edit, re-read, etc.
And lately some voicemail services actually create the same dynamic, offering a really short amount of time to leave a message, but with the option to "erase and re-record," if you are not satisfied with the message you submit. This is a killer for me, both because I like to get things right and because I'm long-winded. Today I re-recorded a message for a potential contractor four times, just to get out all the information in a succinct enough way. Quick! Someone save me from myself!
On that note, before I spend too much time obsessively editing this blog long past my bedtime, I'm going to close out. We're totally psyched about closing on the house tomorrow. Send good vibes, my friends!
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