THE ‘P’ WORDS

There are three ‘P’ words used in business which at first glance may be unrelated until you really sit back and think. Those words are productive, procrastination and perfection.

The one that will do the most harm to your business would be, you would think procrastination but it is perfection. Take a minute or two to let it sink in. All three words are intertwined with each other. You may be asking yourself: “How so?”

I will use the process of producing this blog as an example of how the three ‘Ps’ are related to each other and how you may be doing some irreparable damage to your business by not recognizing the intertwining relationship.

Let’s first look at productive. Obviously, I was being productive a day or two ago as you are looking at a new and original blog. Therefore, I had to sit down, come up with an idea to write about, put my thoughts together on an outline and then write the blog. For this to happen there was no procrastination. However, I may have put it off longer than I usually do, but I eventually stopped the procrastination and got it done as I know there is a deadline that I have to meet in order to have a weekly blog for you to read.

There are many habits that you can use to stop procrastination. The best I have found is, to put a due date on whatever you are procrastinating about. There is nothing like an impending due date to get you motivated. Is there anything on your plate that has been there longer than it should which now requires a due date?

I now have the blog in its’ rough format and the editing process starts. After all, I want to make it perfect, right? However, as Michael Hyatt said: “Perfectionism is the mother of procrastination.”

By being a perfectionist, you are in fact a great procrastinator in that you are going to wait for whatever you may be working on to be perfect before sharing it, or implementing, or even by going out there with your imperfect product/service. You have been productive in creating, but you are procrastinating to launch it. Good enough will always beat perfect as good enough is in the hands of your prospect/client instead of being on the drawing board. Now, ask yourself: “What am I holding back because it is not perfect?”

You do know that I have yet to create a perfect blog? The reason that there has never been a perfect blog is that perfect is an ideal that does not exist. Yes, you can never reach perfection, but if you strive for it you can get to excellent, paraphrasing Vince Lombardi. I re-read the blog making edits as I go along. One thing I should mention, there is usually a couple of hours between reads. I will read it once after writing it. Then do something else and come back for a second read a couple of hours later. I believe the time lags gives me a new perspective the second time around.

After the second read and edits, I download it to WordPress and make further edits based on the suggestions from Grammarly which I have tied to WordPress. These are usually just punctuation. Then it is put on ‘pending review’ where my marketing department will read it and do any final edits before launching it to you.

The reason perfectionism is your worst enemy is if I had bought into that particular ‘P’ word, you would still be waiting for my first blog. What are you waiting to make ‘perfect?’