Perfectionist vs. Overworking

Do you have a chance to experience that you have spent lots of time working on an assignment that your boss is asking, in the end, he only reviews a few second then throw away?

The problem could be your boss have many ideas and he just wants to understand the idea of how it works, but you misunderstood his idea and want to show that you are a good employee, so you spend lots of time to be perfect on this assignment. Sometimes perfectionist may lead you overworking and make you less efficient, losing opportunity cost spending time on something meaningful. Overworking also help you lose the chance to review the project that you are working on if reasonable to spend such amount of effort and time.

Recently, I’ve seen a project with some employees spent a few years working but there is no sales and a client. I feel very strange and how could this company still survive? Maybe shareholder is too generous can accept to invest the company continuously without getting the return?

Later, I found the problem is the leader wants to build the most perfect application in the world, without achieving the goal in their heart, they are not ready to show their client or sell to anyone, because there is so many spaces need to update and improve. I understood the original intention is nice but I felt they are building something for themselves without knowing client’s need.

There is a blurred boundary between perfectionist and overworking. Setup a reasonable time frame as a stop-loss point to review your project can save your time and money, please don’t afraid to tell yourself that you were wrong.