I'm not sure to follow. Do you think procrastinating is a better way to reach perfection ? or do you think working too much is equivalent to procrastination (aka a defect) ?
People with obsessive tendencies may believe (less than consciously) that avoiding mistakes is the only way they can be loved but that it is okay because they can become perfect 'eventually' with enough work. Finishing a project induces anxiety because it means admitting (to themselves) that it is the best they can do. On team projects this may manifest as hostility towards declaring anything done, criticism of acceptable work of teammates as shoddy, excessive work hours, not finishing things they work on, constantly blowing past deadlines, preoccupation with organizational tools and techniques, etc.
It seems like it is about logic, rationality, being optimal, etc., at the surface, but it is fundamentally an emotional reaction (fear) accentuated by a blindspot as to how their emotions affect them. People with these tendencies frequently declare that they are completely rational and not at all driven by emotion, which is due to the blindspot (often denial to maintain the fantasy of becoming perfect so that they can be loved).
In short, if children are only loved in highly conditional ways they may learn that they have to be good enough to be loved, and as adults not get anything done because the terror of not being good enough means they cannot accept their own work as good enough.
As a more “psychological” take, yes this rings true, too. Academic overachievers (I count myself among them, FWIW) are especially prone to this because they condition their self esteem on their ability to “succeed”. It’s a lot harder to succeed at things where you are less confident.
"Perfectionism" can be just an excuse for avoidant behavior. I'm going to focus on this thing until its perfect. Does it need to be perfect? No, but I enjoy fiddling with this one thing and don't want to think about this other pile of work that's less fun to engage with.
There’s no goal in this case to “reach perfection” on the whole. One just focuses on the stuff they’re good at and find easy to do at the expense of necessarily, but perhaps more difficult and less pleasant work. I’ve been guilty of this. And I will be guilty of this in the future I’m sure. It just helps to be self aware or it could get way out of hand.
Oh I see, I partially agree. You can yak shave forever, until you find another thing to yak shave. It takes some maturity to balance this and avoid disrupting the project because you optimized non important stuff.
I even had a strange lesson. In a team of three, the smartest did try to improve everything and never finished so his contributions were mostly wasted. While the weakest programmer, but one who would focus on solving some tickets in very low quality ways managed to feel less harmful to the team overall.
