The first step in tackling perfectionism is to understand what type you’re dealing with. There are three types:
- Self-oriented (you hold yourself to impossibly high standards)
- Socially-prescribed (you feel that others require you to be perfect), and
- Other-oriented (you hold others to an unrealistically high bar)
For example, if you realize that your perfectionism comes at least partially from (what you feel are) unrealistically high expectations from your manager, you might need to work with them to address this instead of just trying to shift your own mindset.
Given that perfectionism can stem from many factors, including early childhood experiences, it’s not realistic to provide a one-size-fits-all recipe to overcome it in a blog post. Therefore, I’ll focus on the different ways that perfectionism shows up in the workplace, and what you can do in these specific situations.
- What this looks like: Perfectionist Data Scientists propose elaborate approaches that take months to yield results even when the company needs something in weeks. They’re unwilling to compromise and you often hear “That’s not possible”.
- If this is you: Remember that it’s your job as a Data Scientist to help the business get things done. Instead of saying “that’s not possible”, provide a set of options with their respective timelines and highlight the trade-offs. This will allow the business to move forward while knowing the risk, and you will be able to “cover your ass”.
What helped me: Don’t focus on how much better you could have made the deliverable, but how much worse off the project would be if you didn’t provide any input at all (which will happen if you are not fast enough).
- If you’re dealing with this: Rather than asking people how long they will need, communicate a hard deadline and ask for what’s possible by that date. Make it clear if a directional analysis will be sufficient; often, what’s needed to move forward is much less rigorous and detailed than what people think.
- What this looks like: Perfectionist Data Scientists are often paralyzed when it comes to decision-making. They drag out decisions in the hope of getting more information or doing more analysis to de-risk their choice.
- If this is you: Give a clear recommendation and then state your confidence level, and what will happen if you’re wrong. You should also add the key assumptions that your decision was based on; if 1) others disagree with the assumptions or 2) you get new information later that changes one of them, you will be able to adjust.
What helped me: Realize that we never have perfect information. Every decision is an educated guess to some degree, and research shows that we tend to overly regret the decisions we made.
- If you’re dealing with this: Put people on the spot; ask for recommendations or decisions from your team rather than options. And foster a culture where decisions are judged by what was known at the time since it’s easy to pick holes into something in hindsight.
- What this looks like: Perfectionists pick endless holes in other people’s proposals without offering alternatives.
- If this is you: Don’t try to enforce perfection across the company. Playing devil’s advocate and challenging each other is important, but it should be constructive. Treat projects as an optimization problem where you need to find the least bad solution under the given constraints (time, budget etc.)
What helped me: Pretend that if you criticize someone else’s proposal, you are now on the hook for solving the problem instead. This forced me to go from “This doesn’t make sense” to “Here’s what I would do instead”.
- If you’re dealing with this: Set a deadline to propose alternatives and reward solution-oriented thinking rather than people who solely point out problems.
- What this looks like: Every single document or slide (even just personal notes or internal documentation) is impeccably formatted and designed.
- If this is you: Focus your efforts on customer-facing deliverables and those going to executives. Any time you spend making some internal working document pretty is time that you could spend shipping more stuff.
What helped me: Try to think about it the other way around. Everyone will notice that you spent a lot of time polishing this internal deck instead of working on something impactful. In a fast-moving company, that actually looks worse than delivering a document that’s rough around the edges.
- If you’re dealing with this: Lead by example; set a culture where screenshotted graphs from a dashboard with brief commentary are an acceptable way to create a slide. Don’t nitpick minor things like color or font choices.
Side note: That doesn’t mean you should submit something completely unformatted. Spending five minutes to make the document easy to digest (not necessarily pretty) is time well spent.
