Another reason you don’t want to run at maximum capacity whenever you have the chance to is in order to conserve the ability to ‘sprint’ when you actually need/want to.
Concretely, I very much have this if it’s the end of a workday, and I have any more energy and I’m not totally spent, I could obviously do a bit more work. Or just money: like, if I have any savings, that feels wrong. And then what do we do?
Hannah:
Like, every time you get a unit of mental health from the wellness factory and you’re like, “Immediately distribute to impact!” then you’re basically almost empty, or like a little bit in the red all of the time. And that’s just very risky and costly. It’s obviously painful, but it’s also going to put you at risk for burnout and for needing to take longer breaks to basically recover and care for yourself. [...] This is a hard one though. It feels so compelling. And the thing I remind myself of is that that feeling of compellingness is simply an incomplete description of what’s true. It does feel really compelling to use 100% of my capacity, and I do really feel that urge to allocate capacity whenever it shows up. But if and when I ever do this — which I do occasionally try versions of it — I end up feeling the effects, and it is not preferable. It’s almost like I have to tell myself, “You’re not well calibrated on this. You think that you want zero slack and ease, but you want an amount.”
[...] But what I recognise is that at times when I’ve packed my schedule as full as the numbers allow, I end up being, I think, a less thoughtful therapist. I think there is a risk of resenting the work, which I very much do not want to do. I actually genuinely love therapy and being a therapist.
I feel like it’s probably the case that there are a bunch of examples in other contexts where systems need slack: like businesses that have budgets where they have to build in 10% budget wiggle room so that they don’t overspend or something. I wonder if having those models or those examples closer to hand would help me be like, “This is like an established pattern in the world, where no one thinks that businesses can run at 100% capacity and never have issues. They all choose to do this thing called slack. And maybe we should just trust — including for-profits who want to maximise profit — that they are doing what’s best for the company or for the aim.”
The other big [indicator of how to know when perfectionist tendencies go from helpful to unhelpful] would be if it’s costing you in ways that are greater than the benefit of the marginal perfecting. The sorts of costs I’m thinking of are around time and opportunity costs, and also particularly losing clarity on what does and doesn’t need to be perfected. An analogy here is frugality: if you find yourself overspending on a lot of things, and you’re like, “I need to make a change,” then the corrective is not “buy nothing going forward”; it’s about conserving your resources so that you can use money to purchase more value, and not use it when it doesn’t purchase more value.
I think perfectionism or optimising or things in this neighbourhood are the same, where we want to retain the option of judiciously applying the marginal rigour and precision and all the rest — when it is actually going to buy us more value. We have to discern when that is and isn’t the case, because otherwise we’ll run out of resources.
I’m not sure how exactly this would best port across to the computer analogy!
I think you’re quite right—and if we’re going to port it over to the analogy, I would venture to say that if you know you’re I’m going to need to run a high resource task at some point, you need to conserce capacity to be able to extend the limits as needed. I don’t normally need to process and analyze gigabytes of data, but I need the ability to be able to on my device.
Another reason you don’t want to run at maximum capacity whenever you have the chance to is in order to conserve the ability to ‘sprint’ when you actually need/want to.
See also various related thoughts, from the latest 80k After Hours episode with Luisa Rodriguez interviewing Hannah Boettcher:
Luisa:
Hannah:
I’m not sure how exactly this would best port across to the computer analogy!
I think you’re quite right—and if we’re going to port it over to the analogy, I would venture to say that if you know you’re I’m going to need to run a high resource task at some point, you need to conserce capacity to be able to extend the limits as needed. I don’t normally need to process and analyze gigabytes of data, but I need the ability to be able to on my device.