Writing well takes a lot of time and effort. I just realized that now. Before I was trying to rush everything because according to my model, it should not take that much time and effort to write something well. I think many of the things I was writing ended up a lot worse than they could have been.
Basically, exactly the same thing happened to me recently with programming. I was mostly writing programs that were completely horrible spaghetti code because I was just optimizing to get some specific functionality implemented as fast as possible. But then I realized how long it actually takes to write a good program.
Updating your model of “what it takes” to better match reality, seems to be extremely helpful. It feels like before I was not allowing myself to put in the appropriate amount of time and effort to hit my desired quality target. And the funny thing is that, at least with programming, it will actually take longer in terms of total time spent, to get some specific functionality implemented on average, if your code is a horrible mess, and has grown beyond a few hundred lines of code.
And what made me update my model is just to stop caring about completing as fast as possible. I just allowed myself to put in the time, and then I observed how much time and effort I needed to hit a specific quality target.
It seems like I had the dual problem of perfectionism. I expect that this is a common problem (at least for adults) when learning something new, and I expect realizing that this problem exists as you run into it, will lessen it’s grip on you.
Antiperfectionism Badness
Writing well takes a lot of time and effort. I just realized that now. Before I was trying to rush everything because according to my model, it should not take that much time and effort to write something well. I think many of the things I was writing ended up a lot worse than they could have been.
Basically, exactly the same thing happened to me recently with programming. I was mostly writing programs that were completely horrible spaghetti code because I was just optimizing to get some specific functionality implemented as fast as possible. But then I realized how long it actually takes to write a good program.
Updating your model of “what it takes” to better match reality, seems to be extremely helpful. It feels like before I was not allowing myself to put in the appropriate amount of time and effort to hit my desired quality target. And the funny thing is that, at least with programming, it will actually take longer in terms of total time spent, to get some specific functionality implemented on average, if your code is a horrible mess, and has grown beyond a few hundred lines of code.
And what made me update my model is just to stop caring about completing as fast as possible. I just allowed myself to put in the time, and then I observed how much time and effort I needed to hit a specific quality target.
It seems like I had the dual problem of perfectionism. I expect that this is a common problem (at least for adults) when learning something new, and I expect realizing that this problem exists as you run into it, will lessen it’s grip on you.