links for people without off buttons

[tielan]

Okay, my sister stayed up until 5am this morning "preparing a sunday school lesson" for kindergarteners.

She has trouble switching off and going to bed anyway.

1. What's the term for "20% of effort will get you 80% of the way there, but that last 20% will cost you 80% of the effort to reach perfection and it's a moving goal anyway"?

2. Do you have any links for how people who get stuck in OCD perfectionist loops can get out of them? I don't know the term - it's not something I struggle with - so I don't know what to google, and what others on my f-list have personally found helpful might be better than me just spitting out random links to her.

I don't know if she wants the help, but I know that 4 hours of sleep does not a good Sunday School class make, no matter how well-prepared you are...

Comments

[monanotlisa]

Wow, that's...definitely dedication. I used to be more perfectionist, but whaddaya know, Bob; taking anxiety medication makes behavioral modification unnecessary for at least the "normal" range of obsessive work-related behavior. (Obviously I have tons of modifications for other anxiety issues, but not perfectionist obsessive behavior.)

Is she generally anxious? If so, two birds, one stone?

[scribblemyname]

Wow. If you find any, do post them please. The only way I ever got out of those loops was after a couple years of being forced by failing health to admit I could no longer do them. Blessings.

[kore]

....oh dear, I dunno. Yeah, my problems with this also got quasi-solved by medication (sertraline in this case) and health problems that now prohibit me from staying up for days and not eating a lot. HELPY, I know. Maybe as a general "switching off" suggestion you could suggest now-and-then use of something like Benadryl? It's an OTC antihistamine, diphenhydramine, over here, and while it's too much of a cosh in tablet form for me to take regularly, if I'm hypomanic it helps me get to sleep.

[unicornduke]

We call it the 80/20 rule as short hand but I dont know if there's an official term for it.

[ephemera]

The Pareto principle

(My personal mantras as are along the line of "done is better than perfect" and "sometimes good enough is good enough")

[justhuman]

Pareto analysis gives you the 80/20 split. In engineering we use it all the time but look at it in the opposite direction. 80% of your complaints are cause by 20% of your issues.

[wpadmirer]

I live with someone with OCD. I've never seen a way to fix it. I just accept it and go on.

[edenfalling]

Something I have occasionally found useful when I get stuck in a "but [thing] has to be PERFECT" trap is to step back and say to myself, "So what happens if [thing] isn't perfect?" and then logically working through each step, because at a certain point NOT BEING PERFECT has become the horrible bad end in and of itself, and I have to remind myself that no, that's not a giant wall across all existence. An imperfect [thing] is just another step, and life will continue afterwards and I need to be in a position to meet what happens afterwards.

But I need to still have a certain amount of perspective to do that. Possibly this might be where having a second person around is useful? I'm not sure how to break out of those loops alone once all perspective has been lost.

And really, if you're trying to make something perfect for five-year-olds, perspective has long since left the building. Five-year-old kids wouldn't know perfect if it clomped up in giant boots and booped them on the nose. *wry*

[thothmes]

Very late to the party, as had been typical of me lately, because I’ve been off in rl a lot lately. I don’t have links, but I have an anecdote.

Like your sister, I have a “must get this done, and done right” thing, a long attention span, and difficulty turning it off for bedtime. In college I was taking first year Ancient Greek, and also simultaneously had my first ever encounter with strep throat. Greek was first thing in the morning when I would ordinarily be sleeping in any case, and the morning was the time when my fever was down and I could sleep. I am enough of a dinosaur that at that time the qwikstrep test did not exist, so there was time for the culture to come back positive, and time for the antibiotic to take effect and the fever to go down. Tl;dr? I missed a number of classes, the introduction of the optative case, and returned just before the midterm. Then I made a Very Bad Choice. In a panicked attempt to do it all right, I stayed up all night studying. I was an elite student at an elite college, and when I showed up for the exam bleary the next morning, I opened the exam, and all those new facts drained like water in a sink from my brain, and I got the first and only F- - of my life. This is how I learned that sleep is vitally important before performance based events.

In the end, I found out that the professor, one of the most fierce and feared professors on campus, known for her implacable grading and the high percentage of students she flunked, was willing to bend over backwards for those who showed a sincere willingness to learn. I passed that semester with a C+ (2.3) and got a B+ (2.7) the next, and kept my scholarship. I retook it in grad school just to be safe, but that course was much easier than the first time, and not because of familiarity alone, but because the text and the professor were so much less spare and more user friendly!