Recently I have been re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which has gotten me thinking about quality, and how the unchecked pursuit of it can result inaction due to continuous procrastination, as the things we are working on never quite meet our standards. I’d first decided that I wanted to create a website years ago, I bought the domain, but months later, hadn’t done anything with it, as I hadn’t come up with just the right site. When I finally got around to doing something with the site, I spent weeks crafting it before I finally felt that it was good enough to publish. I intended to go back and add new pages later on, but never did. It just sat out there, stagnant, for years, until I finally resolved to start writing posts.
It was rather difficult publishing the first post, as I kept going over it, wondering if it was good enough. I finally decided that it was good enough, and if I did find something wrong with it, I could always go back and edit it, it didn’t have to be absolutely perfect the first time. The pursuit of perfection can be paralyzing, in the end, we just have to do the best we can and hope that it’s good enough.
The answer, of course, is no, you still haven’t got anything licked. You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting of the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.
But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What I’m trying to come up with on these gumption traps, I guess, is shortcuts to living right.
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate thing. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
Procrastination as the result of a concern that a work is not good enough or of a certain quality is really due to anxiety. Anxiety that we may have missed something and if we only go back over it one more time we’ll find something that we missed before and needs to be corrected. Eventually these corrections no longer add anything of value to the original work and become work for the sake of having something to do as an excuse to not complete what we originally set out to do.
After enough iterations through looking for things to change, when you can go through twice without finding anything to change, that’s probably when it’s time to say it’s good enough and it’s time to finish. Later, perhaps day, months or even years later going back over our work, we’ll likely find thing about it that we’d like to change, or wish we’d done differently, this is a good thing. It means we’ve either gotten better at our craft.
Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than “laziness,” is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don’t need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments.
I recently came across a work by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, which serves as a wonderful reminder, that all we really have is time, and never know how much of it we actually have, so if we’re going to do something, we might as well start it now, because who knows if we’ll ever get the chance to finish it.
But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
You must set your hands to tasks which you can finish or at least hope to finish, and avoid those which get bigger as you proceed and do not cease where you had intended.
To help avoid procrastination, have a clear cut goal of what you must accomplish in order to consider a task to be done, before starting, then when you reach that goal, review your work and see if it meets your standards, is it good enough? The first time through, probably not, so go back over it, make changes, improve it and after a couple looks over, when you no longer see anything in need to improvement, consider it done.
The hardest part is really getting started, it’s best to start immediately, when an idea or inspiration hits you, to do something of value, before you let it sit and lose the initial motivation. Once the initial burst of inspiration dissipates, you’re much less likely to actually go back and complete the task you were inspired to do. Life’s too short to spend all of our time thinking about getting started on something and never getting around to actually doing it.