I’ve been told that procrastination can be a symptom of perfectionism; you can’t turn something in until it is perfect. I wish I had known of that excuse when my father first called me on my tendency to put things off. Forty some odd years later I found an answer in ADD, but when I was about twelve my tendency to put off finishing things was a sore spot.
The incident that sticks was the day my father interrupted my working on a model airplane. He asked me to look up the word “procrastination.” Without looking up or skipping a beat, I answered “I’ll do it later.” Let’s just say that my attention was immediately and forcibly redirected to the dictionary on my desk. It’s a word that I’ve known for a long time.
While I was never especially adept at finishing things ahead of time, I did become very practiced at meeting deadlines. About the same time I was so memorably learning the word “procrastination,” my teachers also noted that I was a pretty competent writer. I was nudged into writing for our school paper and yearbook. I was tasked with editing the schools annual literary magazine. In college, I dated a girl who was the editor of the college yearbook and she assigned me quite a few articles when she was on a tight schedule. This pattern repeated itself in my professional work when I began to write consulting reports for clients.
The thread through all of this was my ability to produce a deliverable on deadline. There was a quality threshold to hit but deadlines ruled. The curtain goes up at eight because the show must go on. If the lead is throwing up in a bucket the understudy goes on that night.
If you could meet or exceed the quality gate by the deadline, you became the go to guy. Practice made you better. It also made you faster. “Done” was the metric. I became a carpenter not a cabinetmaker. Similar skill set, different expectations.
I learned my actual carpentry skills building stage sets. Again, the show must go on. You don’t want a set to fall on an actor mid-performance. But no one is going to live in that room when the run is over. The expression you will hear in the shop backstage is “nail it before it rots.”