If you have a thousand dollar budget, how much would you allocate for a new coffee machine? The answer would vary depending on how much you love coffee. But it is obvious you should not spend it all to get the perfect coffee machine.

Being a perfectionist traps you into spending the whole budget on the perfect coffee machine. The same analogy can extend to time instead of money. And you should not spend all your time on something non-essential for the same reason you should not spend all your money on a coffee machine.

You have a limited amount of time

From a young age, I fantasized about a time bank account—a mechanism to track and manage the hours of my life with the precision we apply to our finances. I was curious how much time I am spending per category of things I do. Although time is more valuable than money, our societal structures offer more tools for monetary than temporal management. This discrepancy stems from two fundamental differences: the non-accumulative nature of time and its constant, unearnable renewal. You can’t save time to use later. Maybe you can argue that you could do Sunday’s work on Tuesday, but this needs a lot of preconditions. You can’t have 7 breakfasts on Monday morning, and brush your teeth 7 times to free up some time in the following 6 days. Every day, we all get a renewed budget of 24 hours that we cannot pre-spend or save.

These two differences make it difficult for us to be conscious of how we spend time. Spending money usually has a byproduct such as an invoice, while spending time does not have a natural byproduct instead of who you are as a person. If you spend time on the wrong things, you just become the person you don’t want to be. So spending too much time on things that don’t matter is worse than spending too much money on your new coffee machine.

Good enough = good enough

Perfectionists want to get things done perfectly. But because time is limited, you cannot get everything done perfectly. There are certainly things worth spending an excessive amount of time and effort on.

Van Gogh was not doing a 9 to 5 when he was painting Seascape at Saintes-maries and Steve Jobs was not aiming at making a decent iPhone in 2007. Both of them earned time just as we do - 24 hours per day. So Van Gogh and Steve Jobs did not spend too much time on things that were not painting and designing. They could have spent more time on these other things and done a better job at these other things. But they didn’t. They were happy with sub-par omlettes for breakfast and went back to painting and design. These two didn’t lack understanding of perfection than any of us. If you doubt this, go see Van Gogh’s painting. They were working on perfection on things that they care the most.

Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his interview that he has a simple wardrobe to minimize the amount of time and mental energy he spends on deciding what clothes to wear. He has enough to afford a high-end fashion coordinator, but simply the time spent on these things is not his priority. I’m not too confident how well he would dress if he did spend more time, but maybe he would have developed a decent sense of fashion. Who knows. The principle stands regardless. This man has built a number of products that impacted our world.

Don’t spend time perfecting things that don’t need to be perfect. Good enough is good enough. Don’t become the guy who spends the whole budget on a coffee machine and realize that they don’t have enough money left for his engagement ring.

Delayed decisions are bad

Perfectionists delay decisions as they are not ready to make the perfect decision yet. They are worried about making the wrong decision, but much less so about not making a decision. This is understandable as a wrong decision has a much more tangible outcome. You made a bad decision, so you ended up in a bad state. It’s more difficult to see that you didn’t make a decision that led you to a bad state.

I have seen this often in the world of software engineering. Good engineers are hesitant to make a decision as they feel they don’t have all the information to write the perfect code or design the perfect database schema. But you never will. In fact, you never should. If you are shipping good code used by people, you will get new lessons quite often. So you are naturally capable of making better decisions a month into the future than you do now. A hindsight bias is a signal that you are on the right track of growth.

Y combinator also emphasizes to just launch something not perfect. This isn’t because Paul Graham wants the YC companies to build non perfect products. It’s because launching something on the market is the only way you will learn the things you would rather have known earlier. Essentially you end up making better decisions than the perfect decision you could have made earlier.

If you are still hesitant to make decisions with an imperfect amount of information, think of it this way. You cannot achieve anything unless you make a decision, no matter how good your decision is going to be. Decision is just a prerequisite to execution. Execution is getting shit done. So don’t let the aspiration to be a perfectionist get in the way of getting shit done.

After all these reasons, it almost sounds like I hate perfectionists. But I admire them. There is something inherently beautiful about someone working towards building something perfect, whether it be a small kid trying to build a sand castle or Van Gogh painting the Starry Night.

But being a perfectionist takes a toll. If you are under the pressure of doing everything perfectly, you will never have enough time and be stressed of the things you produce. So don’t be a perfectionist. We can’t get the most important things done right if we do.