Why Perfectionism Fuels Procrastination: Letting Go of the Perfect
Perfectionism does not make you late because your standards are high. It makes you late because a task that could be judged is a task that can be avoided.
For most of my school years I was told I was “as smart as you are lazy”. The homework I did not hand in was rarely homework I could not do. It was homework I could not do well enough in the time I had left - and if it could not be good, some part of me decided it was better not to exist at all. Nobody called that perfectionism. It looked like the opposite.
That is the first thing to get straight: perfectionism and procrastination are not opposites. They are the same move seen from two sides.
Which perfectionism, exactly #
Perfectionism is not one trait. Hewitt and Flett split it into the standards you hold for yourself, the standards you hold for others, and the standards you believe others hold for you (Hewitt, P. L. & Flett, G. L., 1991). Later work collapsed this into two things that behave very differently: perfectionistic strivings (wanting to do excellent work) and perfectionistic concerns (fear of mistakes, doubt about your own actions, the sense that anything less than perfect will be judged).
The meta-analysis of that split is unambiguous. Strivings are, if anything, slightly negatively related to procrastination. Concerns are what predict it, and the link runs through exactly the mechanism you would expect: low confidence that you can meet the standard, and the stress of anticipating that you won’t (Sirois, F. M. et al., 2017). High standards do not make you late. Fear of being seen failing to meet them does.
The mechanism #
- The task becomes a verdict. Not “write the proposal” but “find out whether I am the kind of person who writes good proposals”.
- A verdict can be postponed. As long as the proposal does not exist, it cannot be bad. Delay protects the self-image; it is doing a job.
- Delay eats the time that quality needed. The proposal now has to be written in two days instead of ten. It will be worse.
- The worse result confirms the fear, which raises the stakes on the next task. Procrastination researchers call the underlying trade short-term mood repair at the expense of the future self (Sirois, F. M. & Pychyl, T. A., 2013); here the mood being repaired is the fear of being found out.
There is a nastier variant: doing the task badly on purpose, late, so that any failure can be blamed on the lateness rather than on you. That is self-handicapping, and it is the perfectionist’s most reliable escape hatch.
Why ADHD makes it worse #
If you grew up with ADHD you grew up being corrected. Adults with ADHD describe a childhood of criticism dense enough to reshape how they read every later evaluation (Beaton, D. M. et al., 2022), and emotional responses to that criticism are stronger and slower to fade than they are for neurotypical adults (Soler-Gutiérrez, A.-M. et al., 2023). So the “concerns” side of perfectionism has more fuel: the fear of judgement is not hypothetical, it is remembered. Add a brain that discounts future rewards steeply and the arithmetic is settled - the relief of not-yet-failing today beats the finished proposal next week, every time (Jackson, J. N. S. & MacKillop, J., 2016).
Letting go, in practice #
“Lower your standards” is useless advice; nobody can do it on command, and strivings are not the problem anyway. The interventions that work target the concerns.
Define done before you start. Write, in one sentence, what “good enough to send” means for this task: length, audience, the two questions it must answer. A task with a written stopping rule cannot become a verdict on you, because the verdict is against the rule.
Ship the ugly first version to yourself. All-or-nothing thinking is a textbook cognitive distortion, and the treatment is not arguing with it but running the experiment it forbids: produce the bad draft and see what actually happens (Beck, J. S., 2011). What happens is a draft. I wrote about the whole family of these distortions in a three-part guide.
Forgive the last time. In the one study that tested it, students who let themselves off the hook for a bout of procrastination procrastinated less on the following exam, because self-forgiveness removed the guilt that was making the next task heavier (Wohl, M. J. A. et al., 2010). Perfectionistic concerns run on accumulated guilt; self-compassion is what stops the accumulation.
Make the first action decision-free. An if-then plan - “when I sit down at nine, I write the worst possible opening paragraph” - takes the moment of judgement out of starting (Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P., 2006).
One experiment: take the task you are currently avoiding. Write its stopping rule in one sentence. Then set a timer for ten minutes and produce the version you would be embarrassed by. Keep it. Tomorrow, compare it to nothing - because nothing is what perfectionism was going to deliver.
What remains #
I still feel the pull to not-exist rather than exist badly. The difference now is that I know the feeling is not information about the task. It is the old classroom, and it has no idea what I am capable of.