Do It Today: Overcome Procrastination, Improve Productivity, and Achieve More Meaningful Things

“How can we beat the nasty side of procrastination
and perfectionism?”
So we’ve talked about how procrastination and
perfectionism are related, and why it can be bad. But what’s
the solution? I’ve found an interesting study by Gordon L.
Flett and his colleagues; they talk about the role of learned
resourcefulness to perfectionism. They suggest that learned
resourcefulness can play a mediator role. So I started
looking into learned resourcefulness. And this is what I’ve
found from an article by Michael Rosenbaum:
“Learned resourcefulness refers to the behavioral repertoire
necessary for both regressive self-control and reformative
self-control. This repertoire includes self-regulating one’s
emotional and cognitive responses during stressful
situations, using problem-solving skills, and delaying
immediate gratification for the sake of more meaningful
rewards in the future.”
Learned resourcefulness is the skill that you need to stop
sabotaging yourself.
Finding a balance.
Let’s look at the opposite of a perfectionist: A slacker.
If you’re a slacker, you don’t care about much. Good
enough is your motto. And you have no ambition at all. An
attitude like that doesn’t bring you anywhere. The American
novelist Cormac McCarthy put it best:

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“It’s like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it
wrong and ye’d just as well to do it all wrong.”
Slacking is an attitude of “I don’t care.” But if you want to
make things happen in your life, you 
have
to care. And what
you want is to find a middle ground where your
perfectionistic tendencies drive you, but you have the calm
of a slacker, and you combine that with learned
resourcefulness. So that’s why I found a balance between
perfectionism and slacking. It looks like this:
Do great work like a perfectionist, but don’t give too much
attention to your goals like a slacker. And finally, combine it
with this: