Learning When to Stop Pushing Pixels
Taming the Perfectionist Inside
Perfectionism is good. It means you hold yourself and your work to a higher standard of quality.
Perfectionism is also bad. It can get out of control where you’re falling in a downward never-ending spiral of dissatisfaction. We’ve all experienced the never-ending cycle of iterations that no one would notice but you (pixel pusher).
Learning to tame the perfectionist in you can be a very difficult goal to undertake and take years to get under control but never really goes away completely.
This perfectionism is the love/hate relationship we often have as designers. It’s impossible to not look back at some of the things you’ve made and strongly dislike them.
- Either you spent way too much time on them than you’d like to admit and it still wasn’t up to your standard.
- You feel ok with it… until you take a closer look and that tingly, irritable, little perfectionist itch creeps up and suddenly you see 100 different things you want to change.
It’s the same feeling I’d imagine that addicts deal with… wait, is it a real disorder? Designing can feel like the real manifestation of OCD at times.
As designers, we spend an enormous portion of our time analyzing, planning, and simply overthinking. In the end what actually counts is what you actually release, not your intentions.
Leveling Up and Finding the Balance
This urge to improve the things around us is the reason we gravitated towards design in the first place. Often we see areas that could be improved upon and this does indicate growth in your expertise. It’s vital in our roles to consider the little details that often go unnoticed in order to improve the quality and experience for the user. Most of my favorite pieces of work are because I didn’t have a deadline and was able to stress the details. But this is really an unrealistic and unproductive way to work in the real world with you have milestones to reach.
Not Perfect, but Good Enough
You don’t have to be perfect but you need to know when your work is good enough. Being perfect is a flagpole we should still strive towards but with the understanding that you’ll never reach it. What’s wrong with being just good? Your sanity will thank you and you’ll be much happier and productive.
No matter how hard you try, you’ll never reach perfection.
Figuratively, nothing is ever finished anyway and oftentimes you can always go back and make changes at a later time.
Minimum Viable Product and Service Models
You’ll never release anything if you don’t fight the perfectionist in you. The perfectionist would win each time via fatality by a hundred little changes. This is where the concept of minimum viable product (MVP) can be helpful. Quite simply, it is a bare-bones product that has just enough features to be usable so that you can ship something and get feedback on it (and start earning revenue).
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the model in which many tech and gaming companies operate these days. In the similar vein is software as a service (Saas) and games as a service (GaaS). Even Tesla sells cars with unfinished/beta features with the promise of delivering updates in the future. Users are becoming more and more accustomed to early adoption and receiving continual support on the premise of future updates which add new features, content, and quality of life improvements. These models were created because it’s often better to release then chase perfection on the first-go; which you can always revisit later anyway.
Fixate Less, Do More, Be Happier
Check-in once awhile and find out what “good enough” means to you and just release it into the world when you’ve met that target. There will always be improvements you want to make, bugs that need to be fixed, or new features you want to add. Understanding this is important in order to prevent the perfectionist in you from squishing yourself, your productivity, and your happiness like a thwomp.
Don’t end up like this.
