Discipline – the Secret of Success! Work & Win more Efficient

Plan project management communication & strategies, learn focus clarity & emotional intelligence, achieve your goals

Simone Janson, Simone Janson, Simone Janson

• Publisher: Best of HR – Berufebilder.de®
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9783965963832
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Carriera

Time management for perfectionists: fear of priorities
// By Simone Janson

Time is money is money, is the motto in our hectic society. There is little time for accuracy. How do you get high standards and time management under one roof?

Help, too high standards

Now I'll tell you something: that you are a little perfectionist, maybe have an ordnungsfimmel or make high demands on yourself, is actually no problem. You would also have no stress or fear of mistakes. Let me explain this: all these things would not be a problem if in return you had one thing indefinitely: the time - to do all the things with the care that perfectionists consider appropriate.

The job is often about getting things done as quickly as possible. And do not forget, your lifetime is also limited. To accomplish everything that they have set out to do, many perfectionists rush through the day and are driven on and on by the inexorably advancing clock hand.

The fear of setting priorities

Like Angela, editor of a magazine, she gets up every morning at six o'clock because she wants to be at the office at seven o'clock to work through important things before the phone starts to ring incessantly at about nine o'clock. At eleven o'clock is editorial conference, then lunch. Even in the afternoons, she usually does not really succeed in continuing to work on her articles: sometimes she has appointments, sometimes additional meetings are scheduled, sometimes the editor-in-chief has an urgent assignment. Recently, there were sudden problems with the computer system the day before the editorial deadline. Unfortunately, one of the trainees had not yet saved the article and the responsible colleague had already gone home.

"Couldn't you quickly rewrite that ..." asked the editor-in-chief. Angela could - until one o'clock in the morning. Then she drove home dead tired. But there are hardly any other evenings on which she is home before 21 p.m. and even then she often asks herself whether she has done everything right and has a guilty conscience that she did not manage everything. There is hardly any time left for her boyfriend, let alone for friends. And although Angela is aware that her social life suffers from work and that she is overexploiting her health, she cannot help it.

Driven by your own demands

Many perfectionists are driven by their own claims: Angela, for example, gets up so early every morning because she does not want to write her article just kind of good, but very well. She fatalistically believes that something really bad could happen if she drops her high standards to just one point. Therefore, it takes much longer for each task than it would be reasonable.

Behind this is the fear of making mistakes and, with that, of a certain indecision - with extremely negative effects on the work organization of many perfectionists. Because if you want to do everything perfectly, you can not set priorities and decide what needs to be done first and what is less important. Instead, get bogged down in your tasks.

Lack of time - the main problem of many perfectionists

Imagine having to process a customer complaint, organize a project, and prepare a presentation to hold tomorrow. But is not it your goal to be in the best light with your boss? Is not the good luck of the presentation most useful for this purpose, has absolute priority and needs immediate attention? Is not the project very important, but does it have some time left? In fact, not a few perfectionists, who tend to focus on details and tend to lose sight of the true goal, have trouble prioritizing them.

But beware, this is a trap, these are typical perfectionist time-wasters: In addition to the basic problem of being unable to prioritize, perfectionists grope every day in a series of other time traps.

The fear of being dispensable

Now imagine that there is more stress added to the already existing stress, for example because your boss asks you to quickly do a special task for him that only you can handle. So you take on this unplanned additional work, because you can't help it ... Yes, you can! But many perfectionists have two problems when dealing with others:

For one, they find it difficult to refuse others' requests. On the other hand, many perfectionists have difficulty making work to colleagues or employees they do not trust. Therefore, they consider themselves irreplaceable. For this reason, they often ask for additional work that completely breaks their schedule and causes them even more stress. But this stress is avoidable! Justify reasonably to your boss and colleagues why you can not comply with their requests.

Aufschieberitis - the fear of the big mountain

If, on the other hand, you want to do everything perfectly, what others and yourself expect, or always want to achieve something great and innovative, you soon no longer know where to start: “Oh God, I can never do what I have to do ! ” Do you know this feeling too? The mountain of work that has piled up in front of you suddenly seems insurmountable. The best solution would be to simply start removing the mountain in small steps.

Unfortunately, some perfectionists do the exact opposite: they suddenly abandon all reason and your schedule, if you have previously set one, and deal with completely unimportant things. Yes, in almost blind action they defend activity, while always postponing tasks that are a priority. In fact, management consultants have found that some exhausted, hard-working workaholics can do up to 80 percent of their working time with rather unnecessary activities: phone calls, unnecessary meetings, carrying around documents or playing around on the computer are among the preferred distraction maneuvers. In many cases, no one checks how efficiently a perfectionist really works, and even the lack of meaning behind many of his actions is often unclear.

Be honest: did not you find yourself looking at the internet while you were actually sitting on the desk with an important file? And how many times have you been wrong about your colleague, even though you should urgently call an important customer? Presumably, that happens much more often than you think.

Simply unattainable, these claims

Stop! Nobody wants to blame you for not working hard and persevering. On the contrary: once perfectionists have started their work, they are often unstoppable. For whatever they do, they are never good enough, and they still find a reason to improve their performance. Andrea, for example, is sitting so long for the new version of the article, because she wants to do their job perfectly.

Therefore, she researches the night before the editorial deadline on the Internet some unimportant details that she still wants to install. The fear that she would make the article imperfect and someone could still find mistakes in the finished text weighs them worse than the sense of going home and relaxing. Only one thing helps here: Be aware of what you are doing with your time, where you lose time and when you take too long to complete a task.

What perfectionists do once ...

But do not worry: I do not want to urge you to become an efficiency machine that critically eyes every step and mercilessly eliminates any unproductive operation. Because with some perfectionists, scheduling has exactly this danger: the tendency to adhere to rules and a rigid system of order means that these people are rigidly linked to their (self-conceived) timetable. Sometimes they force themselves to plan everything in advance, in detail and then unchangeable, to prevent failures. But just because they want to do something unimportant, their last optimizations rob them of valuable working time and energy.

If they still fail to do what they set out to do, it plunges them into despair. They fear losing control and they suffer from a guilty conscience. In extreme cases, such rigid people do not even want to see that things can happen unplanned and that they themselves also act spontaneously and emotionally. You then give yourself all sorts of logical reasons why it happened anyway, for example: “It is good that the computer crashed yesterday - the second version of the article is now much better than the first”, or also: “It It was important that I surfed Ebay this morning instead of working - it taught me a lot about browsers. " And thanks to such absurd-looking connections, they then maintain the image that everything is under control.

Make it better!

Make it better - but not perfect. Good time planning does not mean that you can be rushed by the clock or your timer even more than you already do. Rather, you adapt the schedule flexibly to your wishes. Plan moderately, because it depends on the right mixture.

Do not plan your entire daily routine, but release about 40 percent for spontaneous events. Then you can react flexibly to surprises. If you plan too stringently, there is no room left!

That's what matters

It is also important that interesting, demanding tasks and routine tasks alternate. Of course these are rather boring, but you can do them automatically and without much effort and relax a bit in the process. Have you followed the principle “work first, then pleasure” when planning your daily routine? Forget it! Many perfectionists like to overlook the fact that their own resources are running out and they have to recharge their reserves of strength: Therefore, plan your free time consciously in your time budget, but do not plan your relaxation phases, but design them spontaneously according to what you feel like doing . And do not have a guilty conscience because you have not made the most of your time and worked to the point of exhaustion, but "wasted" it with pleasure. It is better to consciously enjoy your free time with beautiful things, with family and friends.

If you actively reorganize your schedule, you may encounter some resistance. Maybe colleagues are upset because you no longer want to do tasks that you've always taken on, or your boss resents you for going home earlier. Do not let yourself be pressured by this, but express your opinion with rhetorical skill: Explain why exaggerated perfectionism and zealousness are anything but productive in the long term. And that's exactly what can help you break your perfectionist behavior in dealing with others. But it may be that you stand in your own way. Changing your way of working takes time and patience and does not work overnight. So do not throw the shotgun right if it does not work right away.

self-analysis

Use the following overview to analyze exactly how you spend your time for at least a week. For each new day you create a table like in the example shown below. For each activity, write down the start time. Then enter the type of activity in key words. Use a new line for each change of activity. Check the Routine box if it is a routine activity. In the next column, write down exactly whether and by what you were involuntarily interrupted in your work and, so to speak, unconsciously took a break; or whether you deliberately took a break and actively relaxed. It is important that you keep these relaxation phases in mind. Then enter the duration of the activity, disruption or break in minutes in the last column. Leave the “Value” column blank for now.

Also Angela from the example above has made such an overview. She sees for the first time how much of the time she actually takes to write her article turns up for unimportant things. At the same time, she is surprised to find that she spends more of her time throughout the day than she has thought and often chats with colleagues. But she always had the impression of working all day. Angela intends to consciously perceive and use these phases of relaxation in the future. Angela's overview looks like this:

...

Weekday: Monday
time	activity	Routine	Fault / Pause	Value	Duration
7.00	to write an article			A	30 Min
8.33	anrufen		Störung	D	10 Min
8.43	to write an article			A	7 Min
8.50	anrufen		Störung	D	5 Min
8.55	to write an article			A	22 Min
9.17	anrufen		Störung	D	14 Min
9.31	to write an article			A	12 Min
9.43	anrufen		Störung	D	8 Min
9.51	to write an article			A	9 Min
10.00	Second breakfast		Pause		20 min
10.20