Double-edged stick. Do you suffer perfectionism?

Good day, dear habrazhiteli. As far as I understand myself, I am a perfectionist and for me this is a problem, not in terms of neurotic mental disorder, but in terms of the fact that this trait of my character badly affects my / our projects.

Foreword

I will have to tell you a little about us, so that you would not have thoughts that the cause of the problem I want to share is banal incompetence and nothing more. We are a small and friendly web development team that was formed in 2009. We sincerely love the web, we want to know everything about it, we constantly monitor new technologies, trends, companies, well, everyone has been reading Habr (smile) for a long time. We have completed several dozens of different levels of complexity of projects, among which there is work for both small companies and international brands.

I also want to say that this problem does not exist when working with orders, therefore and only because all imagination is strictly limited to the needs of the client, his budget for the project and his deadlines. Failure to do so in any case will be a loss for the performer, because the client is always right.
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Problem

Perfect must be in everything

In personal projects or future startups of fantasy there is no limit. The infinite desire to do something better and better just shatters all the time. This stupid pursuit of an ideal that does not exist in principle is the problem. Because of this, as the copywriter said, I initially put myself in the position of a loser. I understand this very well. But I'm not chasing an ideal, I just constantly see cons and I want to fix them! But this is the desire for the ideal! I'm confused, I do not understand where this framework?

The impossibility of understanding the holistic picture

An idea is born. Everything in the head is simple, or rather there is nothing complicated, and more precisely, there is nothing impossible. We start implementation. Perfectionism and the desire to do something outstanding at times complicates all undertakings. It seems that every day you go forward, and the feeling that you are moving back to the very beginning - to the idea. Please note what kind of experience there is - even if there are problems in planning, in any case, it’s not just that.

With great difficulty I manage to formulate thoughts even for myself. The task is to bring these thoughts to you. The goal is to get advice, hear opinions. For a better understanding of the previous paragraph, I want to give, albeit a strange but illustrative example. There are puzzles, a lot of them. The idea of ​​the project is once seen image that needs to be collected. Personally, I always collected puzzles randomly, and then I combined the pieces. Almost everything is ready, but while I was collecting this big picture, I have no connecting elements and oddly enough these are the pieces that I don’t remember how they look on the image. And now I start to try, pick up ...

We are currently working on an information resource. And if we talk about the fact that there are no connecting puzzles, then this is a credo, corporate identity, positioning, a clear concept of the articles themselves and their writing style. All this - the formation of the brand. For me, the clearest definition of this term was given by James R. Gregory in “Leveraging the Corporate Brand”: “A brand is not a thing, a product, a company or an organization. Brands do not exist in the real world - they are mental constructs. A brand is best described as the sum of a person’s entire experience, perception of a thing, product, company or organization. Brands exist in the form of consciousness or specific people or society. "

Why do I need this at the start?

First: I am very worried about the user's first impression of the product, because it is so important in marketing. If the first impression is negative, then in the future it is very difficult to attract attention. And if the first acquaintance of the user / client with the product / service caused only positive emotions, then this already speaks of long-term relationships and great prospects; Secondly: on the endless path to perfection, a million thoughts arise about how I see this perfection. But these thoughts are so unstructured that there is a feeling that it is not thoughts, but a feeling of how it should be. Feelings are deceptive. You need a meticulous understanding of all the moments, from beginning to end, and first of all for yourself.

A lot of questions appear from both the team and from oneself - why should this be so? Responding to them - I myself am trying to understand myself. I love to dispute with my team. I ask you to understand me correctly, I do not do this in order to prove my point, more often the other way around - I want to convince me. When they disagree with my opinion, they dispute it, automatically I do the same. The enumeration of arguments in my defense gives me a clearer understanding of why I want this way. The emergence of new, complex, unplanned tasks demotivates colleagues - everyone wants to start. Because of my perfectionism, I am risking the enthusiasm of other people, which is so hard to get.

This is something else.

I know for sure that the problem I'm talking about exists. In the runet, and more specifically on Habré, Forbes, and the Elephant, there were more than once posts from a series of useful investor tips for startups. And in many of them there was a point that you need to start as soon as possible, first of all you need to implement the basic idea, leave the details for later, improve your brainchild endlessly and it needs to be done, but gradually and after the start. Having read it for the first time, I seriously decided to get rid of my desire to have a perfect in everything.

Let the puzzles will not be collected all - I can. But I can not not know the holistic picture ... Let it be something that is not done, but I must know initially how it should look like later. And at this moment procrastination begins. In the work on the project, the sequence of actions, first of all of their own, is played. Everything is chaotic, and what’s happening is what is going to happen, and not what I planned to do today (which is very similar to how I assemble puzzles). I can spend the day in Yandex: review services, hundreds of designs and interfaces; read about marketing, branding, management; meet other companies, their credo, their rules of doing business. I'm just starting to look for something to see the whole picture. At times, the team has a feeling that I have lost my enthusiasm and do nothing. But this is not a procrastination - I work, I need it, as for some, an immaculately clean desktop is needed, when all the sheets are in folders, but not scattered. This is not a striving for the ideal ...

How to be?

I really do not understand how I should be. I know that everything that is written above makes me less efficient in my work - I don’t want to put up with it. Maybe there are some useful articles from the GTD category, which I did not find to solve my problem? It would be nice to see your opinion in the comments.