When Preparation Becomes a Form of Procrastination, You Need to Change

Start with repetition, not perfectionism.

If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.

How many courses do you have to sign up for before you are ready to do the thing?

One?

Five?

Ten…one hundred?

I have a friend who spends thousands of dollars buying online courses; “How to Be an Online Influencer,” “How to Blog like You Mean It,” “How to Turn Readers into True Fans,” “How to Use Such and Such Tool to get 400k views,” “How to Write an E-book That Sells,” B-School, Z-School and all the schools in between.

In the five-plus years she’s bought and completed these courses (although many go unfinished), she could have developed a course of her own.

Her excuse is she isn’t done learning. She is seeking perfectionism and doesn’t want to start her thing until she’s reached it.

This thinking will keep you from doing what you are scared of doing. It is sometimes called perfectionism, but it’s really procrastination.

Perfectionism is procrastination.

Women often suffer from this form of procrastination that is masking as perfectionism. Men do as well, but women are more prone to take on perfectionism due to the culture in which we’re raised.

We can’t start the thing until we’ve perfectly mapped out how we will do the thing perfectly once we finally start.

Which prevents us from starting at all.

That isn’t how growth happens. Growth happens through trying, practicing, failing, and trying again. Sometimes in public. When you aren’t perfect at the thing yet.

I’ve been guilty of this as well.

What cured me was publicly sharing my work.

When you publicly share your work every day, you quickly realize it isn’t the end of the world if it isn’t perfect. When I started blogging a few years ago, my writing was pretty bad. And yet, I survived. And more importantly, I’m still writing.

My writing has improved since then. The action that made the most significant improvement on my writing was…writing a lot.

We sometimes get bogged down with finding the optimal plan to accomplish something we want to achieve, but searching and forming the perfect plan sometimes gets in the way of taking action to get done the thing we want to get done.

We focus too much on the best approach that we never get around to taking action.

I’m guilty of over planning and letting perfectionism stop me when deciding when to make my blog go live, with sending out newsletters, with writing. I could have just hit publish and learned on the job — the fastest way to grow.

I’d be a lot further along if I had.

Healthy growth is comparing your growth to what you were doing yesterday, last week, a year ago, not to anyone else’s progress.

The measure that is important is comparing yourself to your growth.

You won’t see progress if you keep in the planning and learning part of the program.

Take action and get it out the door.

It shouldn’t be about getting something perfect; it should be about getting it out the door. If we only publish a perfect piece, our writing will never see the light of day.

This is what Voltaire, the French writer, meant when he said, “The best is the enemy of the good.”

Action vs. Motion.

James Clear refers to this difference between being in motion and taking action. When you strategize and plan, you are in motion. Strategizing and planning are good things and are sometimes required, but they are not an action; they don’t produce a result. Sometimes motion is useful and helpful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself.

Action delivers outcomes.

When we stay in motion, like going to an “Influencer Conference” or taking a “How to Master Medium” course, it allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. When we stay in motion it tricks us into thinking we’re making a move toward a goal, but instead, it leaves us treading — not taking chances at all.

Taking a chance is uploading your imperfect video to YouTube or publishing a post to a writing website or submitting it to a magazine for publication.

Examples of motions vs. action.

“If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits

Sometimes motion is useful and helpful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself.

We stay in motion to avoid criticism and failure. Humans are adept at avoiding rejection and the feeling of failure — the reason a lot of us stay in motion without taking action — we fear and are trying hard to avoid the risk of rejection or the feeling, I’m not good enough.

You can take as many writing courses and online “how-to” courses as you want, but it won’t lead to results or progress, it may make you feel like you’re getting things done, but really it’s procrastination from taking action.

If you want to get better at something and master a habit, you have to do the thing — you have to write, you have to make the video, you have to record the podcast, you have to build the course, you have to publish the article, you have to do the work until it becomes a practice.

Start with repetition, not perfectionism.

What will make you a better writer, taking an online course or writing every day?

What will make you more fit, talking to trainers or working out?

You don’t need to plan every aspect of a new habit; you just have to practice it.

Make a change from perfectionism and motion to practice and action.

What is a habit?

A habit is a behavior that becomes automatic through repetition.

Let’s say you want to be a writer. The one thing all professional writers have in common is a daily practice. The first day you write will be challenging, so will the second, the third, and even the thirtieth. The more you stick to the habit, the easier it will get to perform.

After a while of practicing the act of writing, (it took three months of pushing through for me), it becomes ingrained. The act of sitting down to write will be more effortless on the 100th day compared to the first day.

“The more you repeat an activity, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits

Neuroscientists call this long-term potentiation.

When you write every day, you are strengthening the connections between neurons in the brain based on recent activity patterns. That’s why for me, after a year of consistent writing, the emotional bandwidth and time it takes to produce one blog post is less than it was a year ago when I first began a consistent writing practice.

“This means that simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits

Habits form based on frequency, not time. The more you write, the more you exercise, the more you will produce, the more weight you’ll lose — the quicker you form a habit.

The more you practice, the more ingrained these habits become, making them easier to do.

Find a cue to prompt a habit you want to build.

For writers, it is helpful to have a cue to prompt you to write.

Setting up your environment to support a habit is another way to reinforce the action until it takes hold.

When I want to get into deep work, I reach for my noise-canceling headphones, and that is a cue to my brain that writing is about to happen.

The cues that trigger a habit should be very specific, like reaching for my headphones and sitting down at my laptop, as is putting my iPhone in the other room. These are all environmental triggers that tell my brain, “I’m going to be writing for a few hours, that is what is happening.” My focus and concentration increase just by putting my headphones on while writing.

Every habit (negative or positive) is initiated by a cue.

When you make the cues of good habits — deep writing — obvious in your environment (the headphones sit right next to my computer) gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior.

Good habits thrive under predictable circumstances like putting my iPhone in the other room, having one place to write, and grabbing my headphones.

The ritual, context, and environment support my writing habit.

Summary

Don’t allow perfectionism to get in the way of your dreams. Remind yourself that action, not motion, is what generates progress.

We all need to plan (I’m a big planner), but when we only plan and learn, they become a disservice to progress — achieving the thing you really want. When you remain in the planning and learning stage of your career, if you aren’t aware, you could stay there, tricking yourself into thinking you’re making progress, when you’re really preventing progress.

To get better at anything, you need to just do it, and learn from the outcome of the doing.

As the psychologist, Carl Jung, said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

More inspiration…

Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering Type A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.