When Your Biggest Enemy is Being Perfect

You spent five hours on that blog post to get it perfect, and you still haven’t published it.

You can’t find that perfect image for Instagram, so you don’t post anything.

And forget about video – you’ll never get that perfect so don’t even try.

Done is better than Perfect

Perfect slows everything down. Perfect can never be agreed upon. Perfect never gets done.

Are you daunted by perfectionism? If so, here are a few ways to tame the perfectionist in you:

1. View everything as a draft – Especially content marketing. Think beta.
2. Define your goals – The more clear you are about your goals, the less likely you’ll get sucked into a rabbit hole trying to find the right button for your donation page.
3. Define 80% –  Be clear about the items you need to check off in order to get the project out the door. 80% and done is way better than 100% perfect and never done.
4. Know when a good idea goes stale – All ideas have a shelf life. If a week or so has gone by without any action towards your idea, maybe it wasn’t a good idea. Like the girl in Frozen, just let it go.
5. Measure – Things can only be measured and tweaked once their done. The bubble of perfection bursts when pricked with the needle of analytics.
6. Embrace mistakes – The best, most savvy nonprofits still trip and fall. Mistakes have made them stronger, quicker, and smarter.
7. Iterate – This goes back to the first point. Draft, edit, publish, measure, repeat.

Done is better than perfect. Done is the engine of more.

How do you slay perfectionism?

John Haydon delivers social web strategy solutions for “the quick, the smart, and the slightly manic.” Curious? Then visit the John Haydon blog, follow him on Twitter or leave a comment.