Many college students and graduate students describe themselves as perfectionists. Most people I know (including me) usually joke about their perfectionistic tendencies or use perfectionism as a comical excuse when they don’t want to change their expectations about something. Perfectionism, however, can be one of the most debilitating mindsets for students and can inhibit productivity, increase stress, and lower enjoyment. Let’s be honest: if you struggle with perfectionism, you likely already knew all this; but perhaps you don’t want to admit it too loudly.
The dark side of perfectionism
Perfectionism can inhibit productivity by whispering the lie that the action you need to take or the writing you put down on paper needs to be perfect the first time. It increases stress because it leaves no room for failure and offers only criticism to anything less than perfection. And a perfectionist mindset can strip away the joy of real accomplishment by focusing on what wasn’t achieved and ignoring what you actually accomplished. It can also paralyze, leaving a person afraid to move forward because they fear that what they’re doing isn’t perfect. Why is this? Because perfectionism has 2 categories: things are either perfect or they’re not. It’s a restrictive view of the world, offering only 2 settings, but a healthier lens sees the world as a continuum for incremental growth. The difference between these two ways of viewing the world has everything to do with how we move through it.
I have worked with hundreds of writers who not only are perfectionists, but who abuse themselves with a mindset that is irrational and unconstructive. One writer told me she sat for 3 hours in front of her computer, watching her cursor blink mockingly at her, while she wrote a sentence, then erased it, then rewrote it, then erased it, ad infinitum. When I asked her why she did this, she responded that the sentence she was writing “wasn’t good,” but she couldn’t explain what “good” meant. Another student was frustrated that his piece of short fiction wasn’t as powerful as the story he had read by Stephen King, and wondered aloud whether this meant he should give up writing entirely. He was viewing his writing as an on/off switch rather than a growth continuum. These writers weren’t undermining themselves on purpose; they were doing their best to write well, but they couldn’t see past their perfectionist lens. The problem is, if we’re being perfectionists, we usually can’t see how to stop it. We’re trapped in a cycle of habitual thinking that we often can’t see past without help or tools. These are 6 tools for keeping the perfectionistic mindset at bay—and opening up your writing productivity to new heights.
#1: Create a repository of ideas
Sometimes ideas don’t work when you try to write them out; sometimes they appear on the page less than fully formed, and the temptation is to discard them entirely and start over: to press the delete key that so many have a love/hate relationship with. Sometimes you’ll have an idea that you think is fantastic, but there’s no outlet for it at the moment. Create a place for these ideas, whether a note in your phone, a word doc, an app like Evernote, or a transcription app like Dragon. The point is, create a repository where you store ideas and writing scraps, either fully-formed or still developing, and then revisit your repository regularly. Having such a place will make you less nervous about ditching an idea, moving on from writing that isn’t working, or not using a piece of writing that doesn’t fit, because it wasn’t deleted; it just got moved to your repository and you can always access it later. This can significantly reduce anxiety over the fear of losing a good idea and allow you to get on with the business of writing and revising.
#2: Use a drafting tool to help practice writing imperfect sentences and ideas
I teach my introductory writing students a tool to use to compose short pieces of writing—nothing longer than a few sentences. The piece of writing is written down, then below it, it’s revised—some words changed, some altered, an idea expanded. Then below that, it’s revised again. The piece of writing is built slowly, down the page, in such a way that the writer can see where she has been, what changes have been made, and in a glance, she can see the development of the piece of writing. Check out an upcoming blog post for the full explanation of this tool. Other drafting tools include writing in a document that is designed to be a worksheet rather than a final document awaiting submission. I always suggest to my students that they write in a document that they will never submit; this decreases anxiety and pressure, as the writer knows that he will revise (or at least will copy and paste large sections over to his final document) before the final document will be submitted.
#3: Set a finish deadline for your project
While this tool may not work for a very large project like a dissertation or thesis, it works well for smaller writing projects like term papers. Setting a deadline for completion provides a hard backstop for when the project will end. Now, let me be clear: I am suggesting something different from using the due date given by the professor. I’m suggesting that you create your own completion date (compatible with the professor’s due date, of course). To do this, consider all that’s going on in your life—family responsibilities, work obligations, and personal needs. Take the time to be strategic, sit down, and think about what you want. Maybe you know you’ll be super busy with work the week the paper’s due, or maybe you’re finding that you’re getting fatigued and you need to get work off your plate sooner so that you can have an extra week in between terms to rest. Whatever the reason, creating your own deadline can have a significant effect on your motivation, because your deadline is your own—it’s internal, rather than external. Sometimes, if a deadline is far in the future, we have a difficult time connecting the deadline that will happen then to the mundane order of our day now. Setting a deadline like this can also help plan out how many work days or work sessions are feasible before the deadline, which can help in planning and create a sense of urgency. To increase your motivation and make this deadline even more effective share your deadline with someone else. Telling someone you respect (and who will actually hold you accountable and ask you if you’ve met your goal) about your deadline will provide extra motivation and will ensure you don’t conveniently ignore your deadline when it gets tough.
#4: Commit to doing something every day
Making a commitment to work on a writing project every day can transform productivity. Setting a goal to do something each day brings simplicity to measuring success, while adopting an incremental growth lens rather than the vicious dualistic lens of perfectionism. This commitment adopts a framework that is conducive to ongoing labor, small improvements, and transformation over time. By pointedly not setting a goal for the amount of work produced each day, you give yourself the freedom to make small progress or significant progress each day. The point is, you give yourself freedom and adopt a lens of incremental growth. When I began adopting this approach, which I used throughout my doctoral work, I found that I was often much more productive than I had planned to be. Some days I would work for 20 minutes, while other days, I would become engrossed in the work, finding that hours had passed, and I had made significant progress. I often exceeded my productivity expectations with this tool simply because I had given myself the space to become engrossed in the project that day or not. This commitment is an easy one to keep track of as well, which is an added bonus to graduate students who already juggle academic programs, full-time jobs, and family obligations. Did you do something today? No? Then go do something—anything—before turning in for the day. And don’t forget to forgive yourself if you occasionally don’t hit your goal because of a ridiculous, insane, crazy day.
#5: Find humor…and laugh
We can all take ourselves too darn seriously, so lighten up! Have you ever been in a room that was tight with tension until someone cracked a joke or did something funny, and the tension broke and melted away as everyone fell into giggle fits? It’s easy for grad students and academics to take themselves and their topics very seriously, and there’s good reason for that—the work we do is often important and has real gravitas. But nothing can eliminate tension like a good roar of laughter. Sometimes it is the best medicine. Sometimes we just need to call a friend and watch a funny movie, go to a comedy club, or sit around and be silly together to manage our tension and help us keep perspective.
#6: Trust the writing process
Writing is a series of practiced progressions toward clarity. I remember in one of my doctoral classes, all of the students expressed anxiety about the process the professor was walking us through in designing and writing a very complex section of our literature reviews—a section on learning and motivational theory. It was daunting, and all of us expressed this in our own ways to the professor at different times during the term. We told her that we didn’t understand everything we were to do, and she responded so very patiently, so many times, “I’m going to ask you to trust the process. If you trust the process, you’ll see by the end that it works.” Surprise, surprise—she was right. It sometimes doesn’t feel right to write things you’re not entirely comfortable with, but trust the writing process—trust that you’ll return with fresh eyes and fresh perspective another day to revise.
According to a recent article from Harvard Business Review, perfectionism is on the rise among young Americans, which means it is on the rise (or soon will be) in the writing of graduate and post-graduate students. Instead of wishing it would go away, we must address it—in ourselves and in our students. Resisting perfectionism is about changing the way we think, and in order to do that, we need tools to reinforce how we see ourselves, the world, and the work we do. Using these tools and putting on the lens of incremental growth is, at first, a choice, but after we have done it long enough, it becomes the way we see the world. And then one day we turn around, look back, and realize how much we’ve grown day by day.