“Amazingly, considering how ambitious I was in the rest of my life, I didn’t really care about getting any better at tap. As long as I didn’t mess up or fall over, I considered that afternoon’s class a success. That’s what was so great about learning tap as an adult. For kids, every new skill might be the one they really shine in, the one that defines them, which makes piano lessons, ski instruction or tap-dance classes especially fraught. For adults, there’s not that kind of pressure. I was in my 40s. I already knew dancing wasn’t going to be my amazing hidden talent.

“So instead of trying to be great or even to get much better, I focused on trying to redefine my notions of “accomplishment” and “knowledge.” I’d been striving my whole life for the best score, the best job, the best book contract. Tap-dancing gave me permission to stop striving and just be stupid. I found it strangely liberating.”

Henig is demonstrating key elements of nonperfectionism, including compassionate objectivity; focusing on the process, not product; setting tiny goals (like not falling over!); and not overfocusing on external rewards. Her point about how she doesn’t approach the rest of her life this way highlights how it’s often our environmental and mental contexts that determine how well we do, how productive we are, and how much we enjoy and are committed to our work.

She’s also showing the benefit, for perfectionists, of having a fun hobby in which you can learn and practice nonperfectionism. Another great example of this came from one of my writing students who was a quilter. She reported having taken a quilting class where the teacher once said, “If no one’s bleeding, we’re having a great class!”

Unfortunately, a bit later Ms. Henig does demonstrate some perfectionism: “My inability to improvise a few unscripted steps felt like a personality flaw.” That’s both overidentifying with the work, and also pathologizing the ordinary process of learning.

Such is the magic of compassionate objectivity that it inspires the same attitude in others. Whereas most online newspaper article comments are sarcastic and dreary, Henig’s commenters are charming and perceptive. In her essay, she reports that she later moved to New York and stopped tapping: several commenters encourage her to resume, and generously offer referrals to schools. One commenter shares her experience starting ballet in her forties and having a similarly fun, non-perfectionist experience: “Our teacher, Melody…also teaches 3-year-olds, and one day she looked at our class, smiled and said “Any class where no one pees on the floor is a great class!”"

As a final bit of learning from Ms. Henig’s fantastic essay, let’s give a shout-out to enlightened, nonperfectionist teachers in all fields.

“But are procrastinators truly unproductive? In most cases, the exact opposite is true. They are people who not only get a lot done but have a reputation for getting a lot done. They don’t have neat desks or even neat desktops on their laptops. They spend a lot of time playing catch-up. But they are likely to be creative and on the whole amiable. After all, if you tend to keep people waiting, it makes them crabby; it doesn’t pay to make things worse by being crabby yourself.

“The truth is that most procrastinators are structured procrastinators. This means that although they may be putting off something deemed important, their way of not doing the important thing is to do something else. Like reading instead of completing their expense report before it’s due.”

I think he’s dead wrong.

His point may be valid among his academic colleagues and other high achievers, but that’s a relatively small fraction of the population. Over the past decade, I’ve spoken with hundreds of people, in diverse fields and from diverse backgrounds, about procrastination, and it’s clear that:

1. Nearly everyone procrastinates in some area of his or her life. And,
2. Procrastination is nearly always detrimental to a person’s professional and personal life, not to mention self-esteem and peace of mind.

The whole topic of “productive procrastination” is, in fact, a dangerous distraction. Procrastination lives and breathes denial — and so, while there are plenty of people who procrastinate via too much television, web surfing, videogames, and other patently low-value activities, there are many others who procrastinate via activities that are, or seem, productive. They might:

• Work on less-important tasks instead of more-important ones;
• Overdo one phase of their work (e.g., research) at the expense of others (e.g., writing or submitting work);
• Help others with their work or personal problems at the expense of their own work or mission;
• Overdo good works at the expense of their own work or mission; or, heaven forfend:
• Bury themselves in housework and chores instead of tackling their important work or meaningful goals.

The consequences of these types of “procrastination as a mimic of productive work” may not be as dire as those of “procrastination via compulsive tv or videogaming,” but they are bad enough.

The primary purpose of productivity work is to get you to live consciously, in full awareness of your motives, so that you can align your actions as much as possible with your values. Dispensing with fictions such as “productive,” “good,” or “strategic” procrastination is an important step.

“If children can build sand castles without getting sand-castle block, and if ministers can pray over the sick without getting holiness block, the writer who enjoys his work and takes measured pride in it should never be troubled by writer’s block. But alas, nothing’s simple. The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on.”

However, if you work on your perfectionism and other barriers to productivity, all your work CAN be sand castles! Those other barriers, as outlined in my book The 7 Secrets of the Prolific, include: resource deficiencies, unmanaged time, ineffective work processes, ambivalence, unhealed traumatic rejections, and an exploitative/unliberated career path.

Yes, your work might be intellectually or emotionally challenging— but the act of sitting down to do it should be little harder than sitting down to build a sand castle.  All your work should be play, in other words.

A key phrase in Gardner’s quote is “measured pride.” Perfectionists both overidentify with their work and tend toward grandiosity, and so when their work goes well they have UNmeasured pride— which, of course, sets them up for a crash the next time it doesn’t go well.

Let’s take it a step further. As a writer or other worker, you must have dominion or sovereignty over your work while you are doing it. Yes, you and others may eventually judge it, but at the moment you are working, you need to forget all about that and be King or Queen of your project and process. More on this here.

This summer, watch a kid build a sand castle. Not only is he typically completely engaged and engrossed and having fun; he is also completely in charge. He builds and destroys with impunity, knowing that he’ll never run out of sand or ideas, and you should do your work from a similar attitude of abundance.

Go out and try it! First, build a sand castle (or snow castle, in the case of my Southern Hemisphere readers), and then import the same attitude and behaviors into your work. It won’t just boost your productivity; it will be a sublime pleasure.

There was another newsletter in the hopper, but this is too important to pass up. This week, Beth Teitell at the Boston Globe wrote an outstanding article summarizing a study that showed vividly how a lifestyle grounded in consumerism and time poverty makes people disconnected and miserable.

Her article is here and below is my letter to the editor summarizing my viewpoints on the topics raised.

Relatedly, please check out my new Psychology Today blog post on How to Help Your Kids Overcome Video Game Addiction and Have a More Meaningful Summer.

Hillary

Dear Editors,

As someone who has taught time management at many venues around Boston and elsewhere for more than a decade (see below), and who has written books on the topic, I want to commend you on an article that really vividly illustrates a key barrier to many people’s living happy, fulfilling, and self-directed lives.

Frugality is a vital part of what I call “values-based time management,” the goal of which is to align your actions with your values as much as possible. You don’t have to be in Occupy (though it helps!) to see that everything we buy costs us twice: the time we spend earning the money to buy it, the time (and money) we spend maintaining it. And as your article vividly illustrates, there are frequently other costs, such as to our health, relationships, community, and (through wasted production and disposal) the environment.

What’s really sad and perplexing is the degree to which the families mentioned in the article have given up their power, without even thinking about it, to corporate marketing and conventional ideas about success.

As they have learned to their apparent chagrin, success and happiness do not arrive from purchasing and hoarding stuff. Nor, as values-based time management teaches us, do they come from grasping some gold ring at the end of the race. True success is getting to live your values and priorities NOW in the minutes and hours of your life. Doing so not only helps you be calmer, healthier, and more productive; it’s a sublime pleasure.

My key challenge as a time management teacher is to get people to recognize the true value of their time. Once I help them do that, they are far less likely to squander their precious hours on consumerism and other trivial pursuits.

Once again, thank you for a terrific article.

Sincerely,
Hillary Rettig

Fascinating New York Times blog post on exercising. Turns out perfectionism is a barrier to many people’s getting in shape.

Specifically:

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that exercise has to be hard, that exercise means marathon running or riding your bike for three hours or doing something really strenuous.” That’s textbook perfectionism: setting unachievable goals.

“I think a lot of people look to exercise to help them lose weight, and when they don’t lose weight immediately with exercise, they quit.” That’s three perfectionist symptoms right there: short term thinking, over-focus on product over process, and over-focus on external rewards.

The interviewee, Gretchen Reynolds, has just published a book “The First 20 Minutes,” the title referencing scientific data that shows that, if someone is out of shape, just 20 minutes of exercise can yield huge health benefits. Perfectionists may well be suspicious of this advice, however, because they tend to be suspicious of success when it comes too easily. They expect everything to be a hard struggle, and are caught off guard when something isn’t.

I’m not surprised that perfectionism is a barrier to fitness because if you’ve got perfectionist tendencies they’re probably going to crop up in many of your important endeavors.

The article reaches a nice compassionate conclusion:

“The human body is a really excellent coach. If you listen to it, it will tell you if you’re going hard enough, if you’re going too hard. If it starts to hurt, then you back off. It should just feel good, because we really are built to move, and not moving is so unnatural. Just move, because it really can be so easy, and it really can change your life.”

Listening to, and trusting, yourself – that’s the opposite of perfectionism.

Excerpts:

“The human brain handles negative and positive input differently, psychologists say, which is why memories of unpleasant experiences seem indelible…”

“If managers or bosses know this, then they should be acutely aware of the impact they have when they fail to recognize the importance to workers of making progress on meaningful work, criticize, take credit for their employees’ work, pass on negative information from on top without filtering and don’t listen when employees try to express grievances.”

Of course, many bosses/teachers/mentors/etc. who deliver harsh criticism are are all too likely to blame the recipients of their harshness for the consequent underproductivity.

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“They’re quite joyous occasions,” she said. “It’s very liberating, not using money.” At one market, she said, she approached a woman who had come along with three large trays of homemade cakes and was selling them for a unit a cake. “I asked her: ‘Do you think that’s enough? After all, you had the cost of the ingredients, the electricity to cook …’

“She replied: ‘Wait until the market is over’, and at the end she had three different kinds of fruit, two one-litre bottles of olive oil, soaps, beans, a dozen eggs and a whole lot of yoghurt. ‘If I had bought all this at the supermarket,’ she said, ‘it would have cost me a great deal more than what it cost to make these cakes.’”

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Most people, though, take too long to quit–and many take way too long.

One question to ask yourself: while you ponder or ruminate about the quit, are you inventing reasons for staying put, or reasons for leaving. If you’re expending a lot of energy trying to convince yourself to stay, that’s probably a sign you should go.

Excerpted from Gulati’s article:

You’ve been conditioned. Scientists know that the best way to train someone to perform a behavior is to reward them for doing so at random intervals….If you look closely enough, you’ll find that the corporate world is littered with hundreds of these variable reinforcement schedules.

Your losses are more visible than ever. Ubiquitous connectivity plus social media equals high virality. In other words, news now travels fast. So when your early-stage venture fails, your friends are going to know about it.

You suffer from premature optimization….This strong human bias toward accumulating small wins is what we call progress, but paradoxically, it seems to be inhibiting many individuals from reaching their true potential.

Personally I don’t think I’m prey to the first two, much–but then I read the third and I thought oy vey. Something to think about.

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