Young Men Turning to Online Role Models

Yesterday was an interesting day because it was fairly boring and I didn’t do much. I remember reading an article by Victor Pride about how to deal with perfectionism to create success. When I read Victor’s article and thought about my performance at work, I started to realize that I am a perfectionist, but this is not a good thing. It actually makes me very slow and unproductive. Victor cites a Business Insider article that has the following to say about perfectionism:

Burns defines perfectionists as “people who strain compulsively and unremittingly toward impossible goals and who measure their own worth entirely in terms of productivity and accomplishment”. 

In the workplace, perfectionism is often marked by low productivity as individuals lose time and energy on attention to detail and small irrelevant details of larger projects or mundane daily activities. 

Adderholt-Elliot describes five characteristics of perfectionist students and teachers which contribute to underachievement: procrastination, fear of failure, the all-or-nothing mindset, paralyzed perfectionism, and workaholism.

I think I will digress for a moment now and say that I owe Victor Pride a lot. I think this happens considerably nowadays but young men (although I am in my early thirties now, so am I really young?) are faced with a crisis in that they tend to grow up in broken homes, and this shatters the respect that they had for their father as authority figures. I am projecting now because this is what happened to me! I should talk for myself. Basically I respected my parents, but when the marriage broke down, I pretty much became lost, and this was especially the case throughout university when I was struggling to figure out what I should do for the rest of my life. Couple with this the fact that gender roles are being questioned and attacked (for good or for bad) and young men are really lost about how to behave. Thankfully, there is the internet, and Victor Pride really helped me in the early days, although there are many other internet role models. Basically the internet has opened my eyes up to many different ways of thinking, and YouTube in particular allows you to receive wisdom and motivation from others. The bottom line is to receive your wisdom from many corners of the internet because there are so many viewpoints on the internet, and there may be no correct viewpoint. Just be exposed to many viewpoints and make a decision for yourself.

Back to the topic of productivity at work. On Friday morning, it took me about two hours to send out two emails because I was checking everything. I had to make sure it read well, I had to make sure it was sent to the right person, I had to make sure I didn’t say anything that was wrong, etc. I suppose there is nothing wrong with this. I cannot make mistakes. That would be horrible, so I guess I don’t really have a choice, but I am a slow worker. This may also explain why I work so much. I come in early sometimes and stay in late, and I take work home over the weekend.

Use a Calendar Rather Than a To Do list

Yesterday was a long day. I woke up and did a few small tasks on my calendar. To keep track of what I did, I used to keep a to do list (I used the app Tasks Free) but found that there were too many notifications for me to handle, so I now just use Google Calendar and if I need to do something I schedule it in. Using Google Calendar to do small tasks like reminding yourself to polish your shoes, cut your nail, service the car, or pump the tires, is great because you can set repeating reminders and also because the default duration for a task is one hour, it forces you to give yourself ample time to do something. Even if you give yourself one hour to cut your nails and you finish it within five minutes, it gives you free time to do something else, so you never feel like you are flooded with work. If you cannot do the task in the allocated time, you can simply reschedule to another date. With the to do list, about fifty items would pop up for a day and I would feel overwhelmed. With a calendar I can simply do one thing at a time as it comes.

Achieving James Bond Productivity

Yesterday was Saturday. I don't normally do work at home but next week I have some work that I need to get done, so I this weekend I had to do some work at home. Working at home is not ideal but the reality is that you are paid for the work you do, not the number of hours you are in the office.

Being a procrastinator, yesterday I didn't do any work at all. I was watching the James Bond film Quantum of Solace on my computer. While watching, I was surprised at how productive James Bond the character was compared to me. He had extremely difficult tasks to complete and every fifteen minutes a pack of bad guys come and try to kill him but using his fighting skills he manages to handle everything that gets in the way of him achieving his goals.

Even though most people's work is not as exciting as James Bond's work, there certainly are parallels. Most people are given projects by their managers and in order to achieve these projects there are obstacles and distractions. The worker needs to overcome these obstacles, ignore the distractions, and move forward bit-by-bit till the objectives are fulfilled.

Usually at work I am distracted by all sorts of things like non-work email. If I can simply try to be like Bond and destroy any obstacles or distractions in the same way the secret agents does it, I could be as productive as he is. For example, if I receive a non-work email I can simply opt to read it after I finish my work as oppose to halting my work to read the email. Whenever I am distracted while in work mode, I plan to simply freeze and think carefully about whether the distraction is urgent or work related. If it is neither urgent nor work related, I should push it aside and do it later or never do it at all.

I also notice while watching Quantum of Solace that Bond usually goes around and does little bits of work at a time. He collects small clues here and there, slowly revealing the big picture of the task he needs to fulfill. This is similar to many of the big projects that people receive. The project is so large that they don't really know where to start and don't know what to do. I find that simply just jumping in and doing something is better than doing nothing, even if what you are doing is small.