How to avoid busyness #1: The Perfectionist

“Busy!” Sounds familiar, isn’t it? It’s an answer we got when asking people about how are they doing, an answer we got when we ask for their help, or it’s an answer that we give to people when they ask us something. Busyness is so common now, we live in information age where information are abundant, and we need to get the information faster, read faster and act faster to stay competitive in this world.

A question from Joyce Meyer that we should ponder…

Are you busy? Or are you fruitful?

Joyce Meyer

Yes, we have to consider, whether we are busy for the right reason? Do we really fruitful (productive) or are we just trying to be busy? Sadly a lot of time, we are busy not for the right reason, and I’m going to write a series on various types of busyness.

Let’s get started with the first one, The Perfectionist, busy for perfection!

Many of us introverts, are perfectionist, aren’t they? We expected that whatever we do are perfect, we’d like to re-think, re-do, re-adjust, re-arrange, re-make, re-vise, re-view, and many other “re-”s to ensure we have a perfect result. It’s no surprise that perfectionist are busy, a job that takes one hour, can be doubled, tripled, or even more because of their perfectionism.

Right now I’m reading a book from Tim Chester on guide to busyness. And it gives me a lot of insights on busyness, first for the perfectionist:

1. Remember the Pareto’s Principle (80/20)

We got roughly 80% of our outcomes from roughly 20% of our inputs.

Tim Chester

For an example, you need to write an article for your blog, by 20% of your time, you’ll be able to get 80% of the article done. However, what will a perfectionist do? They will review and rethink about the article, how it’s supposed to be written this way or another way, rewrite or rearrange the words, and that will waste a lot of their time.

By working all those adjustment, yes you can improve the quality, but the pay off for the time you have wasted are lessen. Just another 10% for many more hours that you have spent. And that will suffer you a lot of time to do some other important things.

2. Accept that we are not perfect

We are human and we are not God, we are imperfect, and most if not all that we have done are not perfect. Similarly, try to settle with the 80% that we have done, make a decision, and need not to look back again, trying to make it into perfection. See the list of tasks or our life responsibilities as a whole, we need to fulfill those as a whole, and we need not to be perfect in every task that we have.

3. Don’t be enslaved by others’ approval

A lot of time we are trying very hard to be perfect to gain others’ approval. We want to look good, gain other’s admiration and praise, Tim Chester put our deepest desire very well in his statement…

When we ‘need’ approval and admiration from other people, we are, in effect, wanting them to worship us.

Tim Chester

We are supposed to take other people’s expectations seriously, but not to be enslaved by them. We should not fear man, as King Solomon put it…

Fear of a man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe!

King Solomon (Proverbs 29:25)

Don’t let your fear of man, pursuit of men’s approval take you away from the your capacity to do more things for God and for other people. Trust God to use your imperfection!

If you’re a Christian, I do recommend the book from Tim Chester, The Busy Christian’s Guide to Busyness to learn more about time management and how to get to the heart of busyness.

Next: More types of busyness in the next few days, please subscribe to my RSS feeds not to miss it!

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