» Do You Use These Procrastination Techniques?

If you always need every piece in place before you act you're guilty of procrastination

I’ve just spent a frustrating few hours trying to work on one single image in Photoshop.  Everything I tried went wrong and finally I got angry with myself and everyone around me.

Why? Because I was trying too hard, that’s why.

I wanted to do a montage of several pictures, and since I’ve finally gotten round to reading Scott Kelby’s excellent textbook on Photoshop CS2 I felt it should be a breeze. But I started with a particularly challenging shot that was very over-exposed. It was the only picture I could find of a traditional blue wooden taverna chair, and I’d decided the chair was an important image to include, but try as I might I just couldn’t get the effect I wanted.

I really should have given up after the first hour, but I was determined to get it right, and carried on trying long after the sensible point to quit had waved me goodbye and gone off to get a coffee.

This episode brought to mind some truths that I know, but don’t always remember to apply:

Perfection is a constantly moving goalpost

You could always do that bit better in some way, applying a different technique, spending more time, whatever. But you’ll never arrive at the destination called ‘perfect’ because it doesn’t actually exist.

But if you take this route two things happen. Firstly you get into a law of diminishing returns, which means you get back less and less for each extra bit you put in. And second, you’ve slipped into procrastination – you’re not actually getting anything done because you’ve convinced yourself you can’t move on until this one thing is perfect.

And it may not even be something central to your goals that you’ve decided to aim for perfection with. Chances are it’s a side road, a red herring, but spending time trying to perfect it makes you believe you’re making progress, even when everyone around you (and you in your more truthful moments) can see you’re just treading water.

If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly

What? Surely that last word should be ‘well’ not ‘badly’?

We’re not talking about doing poor quality work here, but this is another form of procrastination that needs to be avoided. If you wait until you think you can give something your best shot, until you’ve collected and sorted through all the information, until you’ve gained all the skills you think you need, chances are you’ll wait forever.

But if you get started when you feel you can do a job of an acceptable standard you’re far more likely to achieve something. And what’s more you’ll probably do better than you expected because you’ll learn through experience and make improvements as you go along.

My chair was to be a small part of the final picture, quite small and partly obscured by other images. It didn’t need to be that high a quality, certainly not as high as I was trying to make it. In fact it was probably almost okay before I started messing: a bit of cropping was all it really needed. I let my desire to practice what I’d learned get in the way, and take up all the time I wanted to spend on the whole task.

Other Peoples’ Opinions Shouldn’t Stop You

I picked up the ‘job done badly’ technique when I was learning NLP many years ago. My excellent teacher also gave me some good advice on how to avoid other people stopping you, even when they’re not trying to.

In his early days my teacher had been concerned about how other people might judge his actions, and he was advised by his own tutor to go about for the next few days without wearing any underwear. Fortunately he was at an event where he could dress casually so it was possible for him to do this.

At first he felt very self conscious. After all there he was talking to people, both old friends and new acquaintances, with no underwear on. But after a while he relaxed. Because he realized that no-one knew he was standing there without his full complement of clothes.

The moral? Most people have absolutely no knowledge of, or interest in, what you’re doing. And even those who do are unlikely to know all the facts. So there’s no point worrying about what they think, or trying to do things that will make you look good in their eyes. So stop worrying, stop procrastinating, and start doing.

It’s hardly likely anyone will look at my final picture montage and specifically judge the quality of one small piece. And even if they do, so what? If the whole image has done it’s job then I’ve achieved what I set out to do.

It’s okay to be a newbie

Many people worry that their inexperience will trip them up. It’s a short step from this to deciding not to do something because you don’t know how.

Just take a step back: everyone has to go through their first day at school, their first day at work, their first date. We’re newbies whenever we do something for the first time. If we worried about being newbies we’d never do anything and our lives would be dull and boring.

Turn it round and celebrate being a newbie. Declare your inexperience and ask for help and guidance. You’ll most likely find lots of people who are more than willing to offer you some help. Just look on any technical forum on the web and you’ll see what I mean.

Be confident in declaring your lack of knowledge, and open to guidance and you’ll soon be well on your way to expertise.

I don’t want to stay a newbie with Photoshop because I enjoy using my camera and want to make the most of my images. But I know that trying to learn the techniques when I’ve got a deadline to meet isn’t a good idea, so I’ll set some time aside to concentrate in building my expertise, then I can use it without procrastinating in future projects.