Completionism

If you try it and don’t like it, you don’t have to finish it. (The Ideal Cook Book, 1902)

In an online course I'm involved in, as in many self-paced online courses, some participants find themselves feeling behind when they have let a few weeks go by without getting started.

However, instead of getting into the meat of the course, they begin with the warmup lessons — the lessons that contain no new material and are there mostly for people to get to know each other prior to the release of the "real" lessons.

There is certainly value in these warmup lessons, but I don't think that's why these people do them. They do them because they are compelled to complete the course in its entirety.

That doesn't mean that they do complete the course in its entirety. Often, they do the warmup lessons in a burst of energy, and that's it.

I believe that this completionism is part of the reason these folks have trouble getting started with the course in the first place. It's closely related to perfectionism. It's an impulse that says, "If I'm going to do this thing, I'm going to do this all the way. Anything less lacks integrity." And then, they don't go all the way. They just burn out by focusing on details that don't matter, never gaining any momentum.

The compulsion to clean our plates, finish any book we start, or spend a long time choosing just the right font before starting a paper — these are all examples of completionism. We ignore the practical aspect of the work to be done and the outcomes we're actually looking for. Instead, we are nobly ready to go down with the ship, even when nobody cares.

I'm not talking about people who have a mental illness like OCD. I'm talking about those of us who choose to do tasks on our list even if they're not important, just so we can feel satisfied that we did everything. Who hang onto shares of a company, hoping that they will go back up in value to the price at which we purchased them. Who won't ask for help because they want to be able to do the whole thing themselves. Who go back and do work that was done in the old system just so it will show up in the new system. Those of us who feel a little silly or guilty doing it, but do it anyway.

I get why people do it. I've certainly done it. And truthfully, it's often not that big a deal. But it could be the thing that's holding you back from getting what you really want. If you are engaging in this kind of completionism, it could be taking time and energy away from something that really matters to you.

What's more, you could be doing the work as a way to hide from the real work that's much harder and more nebulous. It's easier to finish a TV series you don't love than to work on your own creative project.

Maybe you don't think of yourself as a perfectionist. But could you be a completionist? Are there little pockets of places where you have to get all the way done with something that is a distraction? Are you keeping score of whether you did the work all on your own, as opposed to allowing contributions from others? Do you chase down the last piece of your array of items (or accomplishments) even though it doesn't matter in the scheme of things?

It's fine to "collect them all." But when our desire for completion competes with the meaningful results we're looking for, we are actually playing small. Sometimes, we're better off leaving something undone so that we can see something else through.

I usually aim for 700 words. This post is only 627. So be it.