Daisy Dewsnap: Perfectionism can destroy productivity

Our regular columnist, secondary school student Daisy Dewsnap, says you can still do your best, but you don't need to be a perfectionist.

As humans, hard work is one of our most valuable possessions. We all strive to be as successful as we can possibly be every day of our lives. 

The main reason for this is probably because productivity seems to give us a purpose.

It gives us a reason to get up each morning, and it boosts our self-esteem when we reach these goals and aims that we hold ourselves accountable to achieve. 

Striving towards these goals gives us energy, focus and something to continuously work towards. 

It’s a known fact that humans really are just obsessed with productivity. But a huge hurdle for us on this pathway is our simultaneous obsession with perfectionism.

Perfectionism causes us to strive for completely unreachable, unrealistic ideals which can then lead to a decline in our mental health and self esteem when we don’t quite reach the standards we set for ourselves.

There are many times when we will find ourselves procrastinating doing something, merely due to the fear that we won’t achieve the said thing to the highest possible standard.

Therefore perfectionism and our craving to complete every task we do flawlessly is much more damaging than it is good and it’s destroying our productivity in daily life!

To prevent this from happening and stop affecting our productivity with these perfectionist viewpoints that we have planted in our heads, there are many different things that we can do. 

First of all, we can create shorter-term and more realistic personal goals and expectations for ourselves so that they are far more reachable and we will feel we’ve achieved more by having lots of little goals and hurdles to get over rather than one huge, overwhelming end goal. 

We should also prioritise self care and invest in ourselves.

I wrote an article about self care in spring a couple of weeks ago. Remind yourself daily that time off is not time wasted; it’s healthy and a necessity so ensure that you schedule breaks and time to recharge into your daily routine because you need these!