Why Perfectionism Fuels Procrastination: Letting Go of the Perfect

For most of my school years I was told I was “as smart as you are lazy”. The
homework I did not hand in was rarely homework I could not do. It was homework I
could not do well enough in the time I had left - and if it could not be good,
some part of me decided it was better not to exist at all. Nobody called that
perfectionism. It looked like the opposite.

That is the first thing to get straight: perfectionism and procrastination are
not opposites. They are the same move seen from two sides.

Which perfectionism, exactly

Perfectionism is not one trait. Hewitt and Flett split it into the standards
you hold for yourself, the standards you hold for others, and the standards you
believe others hold for you ^[1]. Later work
collapsed this into two things that behave very differently: perfectionistic
strivings (wanting to do excellent work) and perfectionistic concerns
(fear of mistakes, doubt about your own actions, the sense that anything less
than perfect will be judged).

The meta-analysis of that split is unambiguous. Strivings are, if anything,
slightly negatively related to procrastination. Concerns are what predict it,
and the link runs through exactly the mechanism you would expect: low
confidence that you can meet the standard, and the stress of anticipating that
you won’t ^[2]. High standards do not
make you late. Fear of being seen failing to meet them does.

The mechanism

1. The task becomes a verdict. Not “write the proposal” but “find out
   whether I am the kind of person who writes good proposals”.
2. A verdict can be postponed. As long as the proposal does not exist, it
   cannot be bad. Delay protects the self-image; it is doing a job.
3. Delay eats the time that quality needed. The proposal now has to be
   written in two days instead of ten. It will be worse.
4. The worse result confirms the fear, which raises the stakes on the next
   task. Procrastination researchers call the underlying trade short-term mood
   repair at the expense of the future self ^[3]; here
   the mood being repaired is the fear of being found out.

There is a nastier variant: doing the task badly on purpose, late, so that any
failure can be blamed on the lateness rather than on you. That is
self-handicapping, and it is the perfectionist’s most reliable escape hatch.

Why ADHD makes it worse

If you grew up with ADHD you grew up being corrected. Adults with ADHD describe
a childhood of criticism dense enough to reshape how they read every later
evaluation ^[4], and emotional responses to that
criticism are stronger and slower to fade than they are for neurotypical adults
^[5]. So the “concerns” side of
perfectionism has more fuel: the fear of judgement is not hypothetical, it is
remembered. Add a brain that discounts future rewards steeply and the
arithmetic is settled - the relief of not-yet-failing today beats the finished
proposal next week, every time ^[6].

Letting go, in practice

“Lower your standards” is useless advice; nobody can do it on command, and
strivings are not the problem anyway. The interventions that work target the
concerns.

Define done before you start. Write, in one sentence, what “good enough to
send” means for this task: length, audience, the two questions it must answer.
A task with a written stopping rule cannot become a verdict on you, because the
verdict is against the rule.

Ship the ugly first version to yourself. All-or-nothing thinking is a
textbook cognitive distortion, and the treatment is not arguing with it but
running the experiment it forbids: produce the bad draft and see what actually
happens ^[7]. What happens is a draft. I wrote about the whole family of
these distortions in a
three-part guide.

Forgive the last time. In the one study that tested it, students who let themselves off the hook for a bout of procrastination procrastinated less on the following exam, because self-forgiveness removed
the guilt that was making the next task heavier ^[8].
Perfectionistic concerns run on accumulated guilt; self-compassion is what stops
the accumulation.

Make the first action decision-free. An if-then plan - “when I sit down at
nine, I write the worst possible opening paragraph” - takes the moment of
judgement out of starting ^[9].

One experiment: take the task you are currently avoiding. Write its stopping rule
in one sentence. Then set a timer for ten minutes and produce the version you
would be embarrassed by. Keep it. Tomorrow, compare it to nothing - because
nothing is what perfectionism was going to deliver.

What remains

I still feel the pull to not-exist rather than exist badly. The difference now
is that I know the feeling is not information about the task. It is the old
classroom, and it has no idea what I am capable of.