An engineer describes how perfectionism sabotaged his productivity. Constantly tweaking visual designs and obsessing over variable names and code abstractions kept him from finishing work, making the pursuit of perfection itself the problem.
I have been dealing with perfectionism for a long time without even knowing. I wanted to make things amazingly well, but at the same time I was never finishing them. I have especially observed myself doing this when I was doing something visual. For example, designing something, it never really looked right to me. I had similar issues with coding as well. As an engineer, I often wanted to write the best code possible, the perfect code. A lot of times that also meant that it was never good enough. How I am naming variables, making abstractions, how I am solving particular problems, it was never really good enough.
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