Why Perfectionism Leads to Procrastination

And why procrastination leads to more imperfect results

Deep down, I think everyone is a perfectionist. Being a perfectionist just means wanting to do things the right way. And what kind of person wants to do things the wrong way?

The problem is that with most things in life, it’s hard to know what the right way to do something is, and even harder to actually do it. In fact for real-life problems, it’s not just hard to solve them perfectly, it’s literally impossible.

Real life: More complicated than a game of chess

This leaves the perfectionist with a couple of options:

1. Make the problem simpler by focusing on small pieces of it, and work on making those pieces “perfect”
2. Add additional constraints to the problem until it’s simple enough that a perfect solution is possible

I argue that in practice, both of these approaches tend towards procrastination, and procrastination leads to far from perfect results.

Focusing on Subproblems

In my day job I’m a software engineer. This means that I work on a lot of large projects, with long time-horizons, and many different pieces that all somehow need to fit together. It also means that every performance review cycle (and I mean every cycle), I end up giving the same answer to the “What are you bad at?” question:

• In 2019: “I get lost in technical minutiae that may not be critical to the project goal”
• In 2020: “I get side-tracked by over-optimizing for individual steps within a project”
• In 2021: “I spend too much time on a single step of a project at the cost of ensuring that other essential parts of it are ready”

You get the idea.

Rare photo of me at work

I attribute this unhelpful behavior to what I’ll call “myopic perfectionism”: You see only what’s right in front of your face, and you want what’s right in front of your face to be perfect. The obvious problem with this is that in any large undertaking there are many different pieces that need to come together, and spending the time to ensure that one single piece of it is perfect comes at the expense of all of the others. This inevitably dooms the larger project to mediocrity.

This is procrastination in the sense that by focusing all of your time and attention on step A, you’re avoiding thinking about steps B-Z, since you’ll “get to those later”. But of course steps B-Z have to be worked on eventually, it’s just that now they will have to be dealt with under much tighter time constraints. And that brings us to…

Adding Arbitrary Constraints

Most of my memories from my Masters program are pretty hazy what with all the sleep-deprivation, but one brief period sticks out clearly in my mind.

I had been begrudgingly working on a research project over the course of the semester, and although I had written some code, done some experiments, and had some preliminary results, I didn’t know what the next step was, or how to tie it all together. I remained in this procrastinative limbo for several weeks until I was just a short 24hr away from the final deadline, at which point everything clicked, and I could envision, hour-by-hour, exactly how I needed to allocate my time to finish the project by the deadline.

Tim Urban’s painfully familiar procrastination TED talk

While this in many ways describes a stereotypical procrastination experience, I think it highlights an important and under-discussed point: By waiting until the last minute to do something, you are adding constraints to the problem, and constrained problems are easier to solve.

This might be counter-intuitive, since by adding constraints you’re restricting the actions you can take, but consider Goldbach’s conjecture, one of the most famous unsolved problems in all of mathematics. The problem is to prove that the following is true:

Every even whole number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes

Mathematicians have been struggling with this for almost 300 years, with no success. But suppose we add a constraint, so that now we’re trying to prove:

Every even whole number greater than 2 and less than 9 is the sum of two primes

Well that makes things easy, you can just list all of the solutions:

4 = 2 + 2
6 = 3 + 3
8 = 3 + 5

Voila, centuries-old problem solved! (Please contact me by email to know where to send the Fields Medal.)

By the same token, my procrastination transformed my research project from the intractably difficult:

Write the best damn research paper possible

into the much simpler:

Write the best damn research paper possible in under 24hr

But while this is a problem that has a chance of being solved perfectly, it’s not the problem that we actually wanted to solve, again resulting in a mediocre final product.

Resolving the Perfectionism Paradox

The answer here is pretty straightforward, and surprisingly freeing: Real-world problems are simply too complicated to solve perfectly, and the only way to do so is to trick yourself into solving the wrong problem.

So the resolution is to acknowledge in advance that you won’t be able to produce a perfect solution, and to instead aim for an imperfect-but-holistic one. That way the constraints you get stuck with are more likely to be ones of your own choosing.