Perfectionism and Procrastination

Getting Organized Column
BackStage, August 2006
topic: perfectionism & procrastination

The Dark Side of Organizing
By Kristine Oller

On Friday, you will be presenting a new monologue in your acting class. You have reserved this entire evening to prepare the piece. After running it a few times, you are feeling a little stiff, uncertain, and a bit anxious. Thinking some appropriate music might help you connect with the character, you start rummaging through your CDs for that Coldplay album you know you have but can never seem to find. Flash forward to three hours later: You now sit triumphantly in front of your newly organized music collection, arranged alphabetically by genre. Your sense of accomplishment soon begins to fade, though, as you realize that your evening’s energy has been spent and you still don’t have a polished monologue. What now?

Even the most devoted and experienced actor occasionally wrestles with feelings of doubt and fear while working on his or her career or craft. When such disconcerting thoughts surface, the natural human reaction is to restore comfort by avoiding, escaping, repressing, or controlling the negative thoughts. That is why, when compared to struggling with the emotional life of a scene, the chore of organizing one’s CD collection suddenly sounds like fun.

Any effort you make to get more organized will usually have a positive effect on your life. However, the process can also be used as a stalling mechanism that wastes time and energy. I want to illuminate what I call the “dark side” of organizing so you can catch and redirect yourself if you start gravitating toward organizing projects for misguided reasons.

Perfect Mess

Self-sabotaging thoughts—a hallmark of many performers—can create a feeling of internal emotional chaos. Sometimes people attempt to “fix” this internal chaos by tackling any evidence of external chaos. They jump on an organizing treadmill, arranging and rearranging their spaces and stuff, hoping that a sense of order and peace in their environment will eventually transfer to their emotional state. It usually won’t. While an orderly environment can certainly clear literal and metaphorical space for one to attend to deeper issues, significant emotional repair always comes from the inside out.

When you are starting an organizing project, make sure you are doing it to fix external problems. If you want to redo your closet because you hate that your clothes are crammed together and you can never find the mate to any shoe, organizing will definitely help eliminate those frustrations. But what if you are dismantling your closet at 9 p.m. with the hope that if your audition wardrobe is better-organized, you will perform more confidently in the room tomorrow? In that case, organizing will do little to ease your nervousness and worry.

Perfectionism is another pitfall to be wary of. Too many people equate “getting organized” with “achieving perfection.” They believe that once things are perfect, they will have control. Then, once they are “in control” of their life, they will finally feel courageous enough to take action toward their goals. Meanwhile, they endlessly tinker with and tweak systems and materials in search of the perfect planner or filing system, the ideal headshot and résumé layout, the best database or tote bag.

Embrace the notion that “good enough” can indeed be good enough. By forcing yourself to take action toward your goals even without having a feeling of complete certainty, you will become more accustomed to making adjustments as you are moving along.

Stall Tactics

Perfectionism is merely one head of the ugly Hydra that is procrastination. Procrastination, in any form, is about creating justifications for not taking actions that make us feel anxious. Because organizing is a perennial task on many to-do lists and is considered a worthwhile activity, it is often used for the purpose of procrastinating. “I can’t send out a mailing until I recategorize and change the font on my target list spreadsheet.” “Before I do any drop-offs this season, I have to assemble a headshot file bin for the car.” Hiding out in this mode of constant preparation can feel very safe; the whir of risk-free activity replaces genuine productivity and represses negative emotions.

Another way organizing reveals itself as procrastination is with knowledge-gathering. If you find yourself postponing starting a project or choosing a photographer or auditioning for a theatre company until you have done exhaustive research on every available possibility and translated your notes into colorful graphs, you have probably gone past organizing to outright stalling.

Most of us yearn for the comfort of control and knowledge: We attend seminars, try to get organized, and seek out advice. Yet organizing cannot give you control over your life. It can only help you remain flexible enough to meet the changes and challenges life brings. Avoidance of the dark side of organizing requires having faith in yourself—faith that who you are, what you know, and what you have at this moment are good enough to power your next step forward.

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© 2005-2007 Kristine Oller, all rights reserved. You are free to use material from these columns in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including live web site link. Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read:

“By Kristine Oller of Personalized Organization. Please visit Kristine’s web site at http://www.kristineoller.com for additional information and resources on organizing and career strategy for creative people.”

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