Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit. You finish a piece of work, and then you keep working on it. You go back over an email that was fine the first time. You hold on to a report for three days after it was ready. Some things you never send at all, because they never reach the state you had in mind. People call you a perfectionist, and you half agree and are half proud of it, and you suspect that your high standards are the price of doing things well.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the polishing makes sense from the inside. It feels like care, and care is a good thing to have. The second is that your standards aren't what's slowing you down. Researchers who study perfectionism separate two things that travel together. One is wanting to do excellent work. The other is dread of mistakes and of what people will think. The first does little harm and some good. The second does most of the damage, and it's also what's doing the polishing. You can keep the first and loosen the second. The third is practical. You decide what done looks like before you start. When the work gets there you check it once and send it. Chapters 12 to 14 cover how.

Nothing in this book asks you to care less about your work or to start turning in rubbish. If that's the fear that nearly stopped you opening it, chapter 11 is about exactly that, and you could read it first.

Three cautions.

Perfectionism can be part of something larger. Researchers find it alongside depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder and eating disorders more often than chance would predict. If your standards are mostly about food, weight or the shape of your body, this book isn't the right help. The NHS says that if you think you may have an eating disorder you should see a GP as soon as you can. If your mood has been low for weeks, the NHS advice is the same, which is to see a GP and not to delay. Chapter 15 says more.

If you've had thoughts of ending your life, please get help today. In England that means NHS 111, an urgent GP appointment, or 999 if you're in immediate danger.

And some work has to be right. If you check drug doses, sign off accounts or service brakes, I'm not going to tell you to check less. Chapter 11 looks at how those jobs get accuracy, and it isn't by one person agonising alone at midnight.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.