LibraryPatternsLet Go of PerfectionismI pour disproportionate time into how something looks…
Problem
Toward Craftsmanship

I pour disproportionate time into how something looks — the formatting, the fonts, the alignment — often more than into what it actually says. The polish is a place I can control completely, so I hide in it while the substance waits.

Part of the pattern: Let Go of Perfectionism
Aureliusguide
Aurelius
Online
The coach is replying…
You might also say it as
  • “I spend more time on formatting than substance”
  • “I obsess over how things look over what they say”
  • “I hide in polish instead of doing the content”
The path forward
  1. 1Notice the formatting-as-hiding pattern
  2. 2Address the substance first
  3. 3Format only after
One thing to try this week
Do the substance first this week and give yourself a strict, short window for formatting at the end. The content is what carries the value.
Related problems
A single typo or tiny error can consume me — I will fixate on it long after it is fixed, certain everyone noticed and judged. Trivial mistakes that others would shrug off feel, to me, like glaring proof of carelessness.Accepting good-enough work from myself or my team feels like a concession — a failure to care enough. The identification of good enough with not caring has made adequate work feel like a moral failure.Every sentence I write is edited before the next one appears. I cannot produce a rough draft because editing is embedded in the first pass. The writing is slow and the output is polished from the start but minimal.Every time I get close to my standard, the standard moves higher, so I never actually arrive. What looked like the goal becomes the new baseline the moment I reach it, and I am running on a track that extends itself with every step.Everything has to pass through me before it goes out. I have become the bottleneck in my own organisation because I cannot trust work I have not personally reviewed.I apply the same exacting standard to a quick internal email as I do to a public report. The standard does not scale with context and I am exhausting myself and my team with inappropriately high bars.

Working through this?

Talk it through with Aurelius, and start where it actually helps.