Permission to do everything badly
Is anybody even paying attention?
I sat at my desk and looked out the window. Then my email. Then a blank spreadsheet. Then the window. Then my email. Then my phone. Then sipped coffee. Then back to the blank spreadsheet. Then… you get the point.
I wasn’t able to focus. I was meant to build a project plan, but I didn’t want to do it. I considered the project boring, and building plans for boring projects is doubly boring. The importance of the task, in that it was part of my job so I had to do it, was playing second fiddle to (a lack of) motivation.
We humans are very good at distracting ourselves from things we don’t want to do. It’s often hard enough getting yourself to do something you want to do. But regardless of desire or otherwise, remove self-discipline and you’ll soon be behind. Add an inability to say no to other people’s requests and you’ll be overwhelmed. Include a smartphone in the mix, and you’re screwed.
A former manager of mine would often say:
“I’ve got so much to do, with so little time to do it, I’ll just have to do it all badly”
I think we all feel a bit like this some of the time. Scrap that.
I think we all feel a lot like this a lot of the time.
There’s something in the “do it all badly” part though. How much of what we do, needs to be perfect or anything near it? In reality, not much. Many of the tasks we complete are just fine at 80% good enough, sometimes less!
It’s quite usual for the thing that’s stopping us moving forward, to be the hypothetical ‘picture’ of the finished product that is too hard to achieve. We get concerned we’ll fall short (i.e. fail), so we do nothing whilst we muster up the motivation to do it to “properly”.
You can’t force motivation, but you can coax it. How? Just start.
Accept you need to do everything badly, at least to start with. Often, no one else will know there’s something incomplete in the ‘final report’. So just produce a good enough version, send it out, seek feedback, and refine. You’ll be fine.
I’m happy to report, I did end up ‘just starting’ on that project plan. It was done a few hours later. I did it to about 60% of the perfection I envisaged, then realised that’s all it ever needed to be. Job well done, even with a strong dose of boredom.
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