I learned about it while studying economics in school, and here’s what it says:

The law of diminishing returns state that as more units of a variable input (like time, effort) are added to a productive process, the additional output (or benefit) from each new unit will eventually decrease.^[1]

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Let’s say you have a cornfield and you want to increase your corn yield with fertilizer.

• Adding one bag of fertilizer significantly boosts your crop yield.
• Adding a 2nd and 3rd bag increases your yield further, by roughly the same amount.
• Adding a 4th bag still increases it but by a smaller margin. Each additional bag after that contributes less and less to the total yield, even though it’s the exact same type of fertilizer! This smaller yield increase is called diminishing returns.
• If you keep adding more fertilizer beyond diminishing returns, the field becomes overfertilized and you will get a decrease in total corn yield! This is called negative returns.

See graph below:

(Image: Personal Excellence)

Diminishing Returns in Our Life

Diminishing returns can actually be observed in different areas of our life. Consider these examples:

• Work. The initial hours of a work day are usually the most productive. In the later hours, productivity starts to decline as our energy decreases. At a certain point, it results in burnout.
• Social media. While using social media can feel fun and enjoyable at first, after some time it becomes less enjoyable. Using it for 2, 3, 4 hours can feel draining and sucks up our productivity.
• Learning. The first book we read on a topic is usually the most helpful as we learn its fundamental concepts. Reading 10 more books on the same topic may continue to be helpful. But to read 20, 30, or 50 books on the exact same thing? It becomes repetitive and offers diminishing gains (unless the book is extremely well-written with unique value-add to the topic).
• Meetings. Having meetings every week can improve clarity and collaboration at work. But having too many meetings adds little value, eats into productive work time, and creates mental drain.

As a writer, I typically have high output during the first 2-3 hours of my writing session. Beyond a certain point, I’m editing and rewriting points but not making much gains. That’s my point of diminishing returns.

For my site content, it’s helpful for my readers when I write articles on a new topic. But to write 10, 20, 30 articles on the exact same topic without any new insight or ideas? It leads to diminishing returns, which is why I do not write repetitive content even though it is common to do so for self-help blogs.

Can you see situations with diminishing returns in your life?

What We Can Learn From This 💡

The law of diminishing returns teaches us some important things:

• Firstly, more isn’t always better. Beyond a certain point, adding more time, effort, or resources leads to a slower growth in output. And beyond that, it leads to negative gains.
• Secondly, it’s important to find the optimal point that gives you the best return. By strategically allocating our time, effort, and resources, we can achieve greater results without increasing input.
• Thirdly, rest and variation can help us sustain high levels of productive output over time.

This is true whether in work, relationships, health, or skill improvement. E.g., with relationships, there are diminishing returns from having too many meetups a week — it takes away from productive work time and me time. With health, there are diminishing returns with each health protocol you follow — it is better to branch out and try other approaches that can jumpstart your progress.

At the heart of it, the law of diminishing returns is a reminder for us to work smarter and to aim for better results with less wasted effort.

With each goal you are working on (whether it’s work, health, exercise, relationships, etc.), you want to focus on the steps where you can get the most returns, and to stop and change your action when you reach diminishing returns.

Stop in the zone of diminishing returns, when payoff is not justified by added input (Image: Personal Excellence)

For example:

• Studying: Studying for 2 hours can help you learn a lot, but studying for 6 hours straight can lead to reduced retention and smaller gains per hour. Take short breaks to move around, rest, and recharge first, and then return with better focus.
• Creating content: When creating a report, you spend 2 hours creating a solid draft and another hour refining it. In the 4th hour though, you are busy nitpicking details that have no actual impact on the output. That means it’s time to wrap up and move on.
• Improving health: Say you are optimizing your health. You tried a bunch of supplements and they either had minor or no noticeable effect. Here, branch out to try new things. Try sauna, castor oil, grounding, switching to a whole food diet, herbs, and exercise. Research supplements that target different areas of health. Join health communities to get fresh ideas to jumpstart your progress.
• Growing blog: Lastly, you’ve been guest posting and it has given you healthy traffic gains. However, it’s now harder to find sites to guest post on and the traffic gain from this strategy has also diminished. At this point, it’s better to pivot to other strategies, such as Tiktok, YouTube, or Pinterest.

Managing the Law of Diminishing Returns: How To Maximize Productivity and Gains 📈

So how can you maximize productive gains and minimize diminishing returns while spending the same time and effort? Very importantly, how do you avoid negative gains? Here are my 7 tips.

1. Recognize when you are getting diminishing returns.
   • Be aware when you are entering the zone of diminishing returns. Clear signs are when you make slower progress, you get less gain per input, the quality of the task doesn’t noticeably improve, or you feel mentally fatigued.
   • For quantifiable goals (e.g., growing subscribers, sales), track and measure to know when diminishing returns kick in.
2. Work in strategic time blocks.
   • Identify the times of the day when you are most productive, and design your work day around these time blocks. Try to spend these productive hours on the most important tasks.
3. Focus on the 80/20.
   • Focus on high-impact strategies. With every goal, adopt strategies that give you the best return. When progress slows down, adjust your approach and adopt the next best strategy.
   • Prioritize high-impact tasks. Every day, focus on the tasks that give you the highest impact in terms of your end goal. Ask yourself, “Is this the best use of my time? Is this the most meaningful thing I can do now?”
   • Avoid fine-tuning to oblivion. When working on a task, you may fine-tune things to oblivion. Perfectionism is good, but save it for tasks that really matter. For most tasks, do them to a good-enough quality and move on. Read: How To Overcome Perfectionism (series)
4. Allow yourself to rest. Know that you are the most productive when your energy is high, not just when you’re at your desk. Rest and rejuvenation are vital for restoring productivity.
   • Take steps to recover cognitively before returning to high-level tasks. If possible, get a change in environment. Try to take proper breaks such as going for a walk, practicing self-care, watching videos you enjoy, or spending time with a loved one.
   • Have restorative off days where you do something different from your usual routine (e.g., a weekend trip, an excursion) and recharge your mind and spirit.
5. Switch things up. Switch between different tasks to keep engagement high. For example:
   • Work: Switch between high-level tasks when you are recharged and low-level tasks (emails, admin) when you feel fatigued.
   • Writing a book: Switch between writing different chapters, designing the book cover, and creating the marketing plan.
6. Know when to stop or change action. Upon entering diminishing returns, monitor your progress and decide when to stop or pivot. Ask yourself, “Am I still getting good gains, or am I getting diminishing returns?” If additional effort brings minimal gains, and the payoff is not worth it, it might be time to take a break, move on to the next task, or change your approach.
7. Get feedback where possible. Avoid being locked into tunnel vision by regularly engaging others in what you’re doing. If you work in a company, involve your co-workers and manager to get their feedback. If you’re a solo creator, you can talk to friends and family, or share your ideas with industry peers and on forums. This prevents wasted effort from working on things that are not viable.

Final Word

Finally, regularly consider your goal in the context of other goals and priorities. Even if a goal is giving you productive gains now, it may be causing diminishing gains in other areas of your life, and as such your objective may not be to maximize these good gains.

For example, perhaps you are getting good financial gains and opportunities at work, but it is causing diminishing gains in your fulfillment and personal life (e.g., health, family). Here you may decide to switch focus to your personal life and cut back on your time spent at work, even though you are growing work-wise.

Case in point: Patrick Dempsey was a leading actor and the highest paid cast member on Grey’s Anatomy when he suddenly left the role in April 2015. The show was doing extremely well and in its 11th season then. So why did he leave? Even though Dempsey was experiencing great career growth and earning great money, he was burned out by the 10-month, 15-hour-a-day filming schedule. He said in an interview, “I think after a certain period of time, no matter how much money you make, you want control out of your own schedule.”^[2]

His marriage was also a driving point as his wife had filed for divorce months earlier in January 2015. “Our marriage was not something I was prepared to let go of,” he said. Knowing their marriage could end was a “scary” feeling. Through couples counseling, they reconciled and called off their divorce in 2016.^[3]

Know that there is a larger context which is your end objective and your other priorities in life. Your priorities can always change based on what’s going on in your life. You have to evaluate if you are still getting meaningful gains from what you are doing (e.g., money, happiness, fulfillment), or if it’s more rewarding to switch focus to something else (such as health, relationships, or family).

To You

The next time you engage in a task or activity, ask yourself:

1. Am I getting good gains, or am I getting diminishing returns?
2. Is the payoff justified by the additional input?
3. If the payoff is not worth it, it may be time to put a stop to this task or activity. Take a break, move on to the next task, or change your approach.

Learn to spot diminishing returns in your life and direct your effort accordingly to areas where you can get the most returns. This way you can get more out of life with the same time, effort, and resources. :)

Related posts:

• How To Overcome Perfectionism: A Complete Guide
• The Bike Shed Effect: How To Spend Time on the Right Things
• The 80/20 Principle: How To Achieve More With Less In Life (series)

Quick Note: I’m excited to share that the 2025 edition of Live a Better Life in 30 Days (30DLBL) is now out! 30DLBL is my 30-day program to live a better life and it’s a great tool to do a life audit, set goals, and move your life to a new trajectory. Here’s a comment from reader Sam:

“After working on 30DLBL for just a few days, I know what I have been lacking; the ability to envision my dreams and come up with a plan to achieve them. While my current goals may change with time, I feel more confident and in control knowing that at least, for now, I know where to focus my efforts.

Thank you so much Celes for creating this truly transformative, easy to follow guide! This is a game changer for anyone feeling stuck in a cycle of similar patterns and behaviours.”

If you’re experiencing diminishing returns from working on your personal growth from self-help resources, 30DLBL is a great way to jumpstart your growth. Read about 30DLBL here, or if you are a past buyer, learn how to get access here! Any questions? Let me know here. :)

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Have you heard of the bike shed effect before? Also known as Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, it’s the idea that people spend excessive time on trivial issues, while spending less time on complex, important ones.

Imagine a management committee who are given the plans for a nuclear power plant costing billions of dollars. The topic is complex and outside their expertise, so they approve it with little discussion.

They are then given the plans to build a bike shed. Everyone can visualize a bike shed, so they get into a nitpicking debate about what color to paint it. They end up spending much more time discussing the bike shed, even though the power plant is much more expensive!

In short, people tend to spend more time than needed on trivial issues out of comfort and familiarity, even though they should be completed quickly. The act of lingering and spending excess time on small issues, while neglecting the more difficult and important ones, is called “bikeshedding.”

Examples of Bikeshedding in Our Goals

While the concept of the bike shed effect is used in corporate and business contexts, it applies to personal growth too.

Here are some examples of bikeshedding in our goals:

• Individual: Spends excessive time thinking about whether to buy brown or black pants for work, while neglecting personal health issues
• Employee: Spends hours editing the formatting of a report, instead of improving the report content
• Software developer: Spends an overly long time choosing a perfect shade of blue for a button, rather than fixing a major performance issue
• Blogger: Rewrites their “About” page for the 20th time, instead of working on traffic building strategy after a recent Google update
• Business owner: Spends weeks perfecting logo, slogan, and namecards, and delays working on actual product development

It can also be observed in our relationships, like so:

• A couple spends excessive time discussing what to eat rather than their future goals.
• In a family with aging parents, spending hours talking about mundane topics while ignoring important and difficult topics like long-term care and estate planning.
• A parent spends more time than necessary thinking about what clothes to buy for the child, rather than the child’s mental health and emotional needs at school.

Reflect on your life today and you will easily see the bike shed effect at work.

For example, maybe you worry too much about a simple purchase decision (like choosing colors). You spend a lengthy amount of time along supermarket aisles, pondering whether to buy whole wheat bread or multi-grain bread. You stress out over whether to go to Country A or B for your vacation (or even between choosing Hotel A or B).

All this while, there are bigger and more complex topics in your life being neglected and left by the wayside, such as figuring out your career next steps, improving your health and diet, addressing emotional eating issues, sorting out financial issues, and planning for long-term financial goals. While the topics above (choosing colors, what product variant to buy, etc.) may seem important initially, fast forward a month or year — these discussions lose their significance.

 Can you relate to any of these examples?

Why Bikeshedding Happens

So why does this happen? There are a few reasons:

• Comfort. Simple tasks feel comfortable since they are easy to grasp and understand. Complex topics require us to spend a lot of time and mental energy to understand them, and this can be intimidating so we avoid them.
• Lack of expertise. People may feel that the big topics are beyond them and they lack the expertise to tackle the big decisions. So they just stick to the simple, easy topics.
• Risk of failure. There is a risk of failure involved with complex topics, with bigger consequences since they have higher stakes. So we avoid them to prevent failure and mistakes.
• Desire to contribute. When it comes to discussions, people like to feel involved and contribute their opinions. Simple topics let them do so easily as they are easy to understand and relate to.

Bikeshedding: A focus on the wrong things

Bikeshedding: Focusing on trivial things rather than important things (Image)

At its core, bikeshedding is an issue of time wastage and having a wrong focus. Spending too much time on the little things rather than the big, important topics.

Instead of channeling our resources into big-ticket items that will make the biggest difference to our goals and lives, we linger on little tasks for comfort. In turn, critical tasks and decisions get delayed or overlooked.

It’s also an issue of noise. Instead of properly discussing difficult topics with the biggest stakes, such as a nuclear power plant, we spend hours talking about low-stakes topics like what color to paint a bike shed. There is a false sense of productivity — a lot gets discussed, but there is little to no value added.

The answer is to learn to channel our time and energy to the important matters, and to spend the right time on the right things. So instead of spending time excessively on small to-dos, we want to spend time based on the importance and complexity of a topic, like so:

(Image: Personal Excellence)

How To Avoid Bikeshedding and Spend Time on the Right Things

So how can we avoid bikeshedding in our life and focus on the important nuclear power plant decisions in our life? Here are my 8 tips.

1. Be clear of the high-impact items in your life. Every day, start off with a list of your high-impact and low-impact tasks. High-impact tasks will make the most change and impact in your life when completed. Low-impact tasks are small, routine items that need to be done. (If you have Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program, read Day 8: Evaluate Your To-Do List.)
2. Allocate time to the tasks based on importance and complexity. Your high-impact tasks should get the most time and low-impact tasks should get the least time. Don’t fall into the bikeshedding trap, where small items get disproportionate time compared to big items.
3. Set time limits for small items (e.g., 5 minutes per item) so that they don’t balloon out of control. Remember that when it comes to the small stuff, the goal is good enough, not perfection. Achieve the key criteria, get it done to a good quality, and move on. Read: How To Overcome Perfectionism (series)
4. Pick one and go. If the decision doesn’t matter in the long run, then just pick any option and go. For you to feel conflicted over the choices, that usually means that the choices are likely pretty good and it’s not going to matter much which one you pick. So don’t spend hours debating a small thing endlessly — pick one and make the best out of it. Read: How To Stop Analysis Paralysis
5. Redirect focus to the important. Be aware when you are bikeshedding and redirect focus back to the important. Ask yourself: “Is this important? Will this affect me 1, 3, or 5 years from now? What’s at stake here? Are there more important things on the agenda to work on?” If there is nothing major at stake and it’s not going to affect you in the long-term, then it’s not all that significant and you shouldn’t be spending so much time on it in the first place. Take a quick break to reset focus if needed.
6. Engage the right people for your goals. The best way to avoid noise is to speak to the right people regarding your goals and tasks. Only involve people with a stake in the matter, who have expertise in the subject-matter, and/or who often shares helpful advice. Don’t share your goals with people who tend to be critical and offer pessimistic views.
7. Defer things for follow-up later. If a low-impact topic keeps dragging on and on, then defer it for follow up later. Take it offline or discuss it at a different time. You may see it with a fresh mind and make a faster decision then.
8. Seek expert opinion. We avoid the difficult topics because they are too intimidating, but remember that you don’t have to do this alone. Get help from people with subject-matter expertise. What kind of help do you need and where can you find these people? Search online, join related communities, ask around, engage professionals. These experts can bring clarity to the topic, reduce time wastage, clarify the options, and help you make a faster decision.

Do you see the bike shed effect in your life? How can you apply the 8 tips above and spend the right time on the right things? Let me know in the comments section. :)

The next time you see yourself fussing over a small task, ask yourself, “Am I building a bike shed or power plant?” Redirect your focus to the power plants in your life, and let go of the fixation on bike sheds. 🚲

This series is available for download as an ebook. Click on the button below to download.

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This is part 3 of a 3-part series on the downsides of perfectionism and how to turn perfectionism into a positive force in your life.

• Part 1: 10 Signs You Are a Perfectionist
• Part 2: 6 Hidden Downsides of Perfectionism
• Part 3: How To Overcome Perfectionism: A Complete Guide

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So far in part 1, I shared 10 signs that you are a perfectionist. In part 2, I shared 6 hidden downsides of perfectionism, including diminished productivity, procrastination, lower self-esteem, and impaired relationships with others.

As I shared in part 1, I used to be a neurotic perfectionist. While being a perfectionist helped me achieve results in my goals, it had its negative downsides. I would spend excessive time perfecting things, focus on little details that took time away from other things, and add weight to my relationships because of my high expectations.

Over time, I learned to tackle neurotic perfectionism and channel my high standards and drive in a positive way. How do you maximize the benefits of perfectionism and limit its negatives? How do you prevent perfectionism from negatively affecting you? Here are 8 steps to tackle perfectionism and turn it into a positive force in your life.

1) Remove the all-or-nothing mindset

(Image: Personal Excellence)

A perfectionist tends to have black-and-white thinking (i.e., all-or-nothing mindset), where they see things in extremes. If things did not happen perfectly, they would label it as a disaster. But such thinking is terminalistic as any progress is dismissed just because the outcome didn’t match their definition of success.

For example:

• A perfectionist trainer who made a mistake: “I can’t believe I fumbled in my presentation just now. It was a disaster.”
• A perfectionist student who couldn’t answer a question: “I did so badly on my paper today. I’m a failure.”

Remove your black-and-white lens and stop seeing things in extremes. Recognize that there are many outcomes between 100% success and 100% failure — just because something isn’t a total success doesn’t mean it’s a total failure. It could be a 30%, 50%, or 80% success, and that isn’t a total disaster, far from it.

So with a perfectionistic trainer, it may look like this: “I fumbled over part of my presentation, but the rest went well and the attendees were very engaged. I did a great job! I’ll rehearse next time for a smoother presentation.”

Or with a perfectionist student: “I didn’t know how to do question 10 but I could answer the 19 other questions, which is a worthy accomplishment. I will step up my revision and do more test papers next time.”

See things in perspective and recognize the middle ground. Identify the parts you did well and give yourself credit for them. Work on the parts that didn’t go so well. Even if 0% of things went to plan, that’s still progress because now you know what doesn’t work. Success happens in steps, and just because things didn’t happen 100% to plan doesn’t mean that you aren’t progressing in some way. Identify the lessons you have learned and use them to help you next time.

2) Aim for good enough

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Achieving perfection is a long and elaborate process — as I shared in part 2, it takes an astonishing amount of effort (80% of input) to perfect the last 20% of a task. While you can achieve perfection when managing just 1-2 tasks, sure, it’s arduous when you have many other things on your task list.

By the 80/20 principle, 20% of input leads to 80% of output

To achieve perfection, you need to spend 80% time and effort to perfect the last 20% of a task

Instead of trying to perfect everything, adjust your standards and aim for good enough. This means:

• When working on a task, aim to achieve the key objectives, deliver good-quality work, and call it a day.
• Go for the 80/20 — achieve the essential 80% output with 20% of effort.
• Draw a cutoff when you reach diminishing returns, which is the point when the value of pushing on decreases rapidly.
• Understand that whatever you can do now is the best version given the time limit. If your work contributes to the overall goal, then that’s a worthy accomplishment. 👍

The exception is if you are working on an important goal with very high stakes, in which case perfection is the goal. For all other tasks, aim for good enough.

Know that there is an opportunity cost with achieving perfection. When you are constantly fussing over little, unimportant details, you have less time for other things on your list. There are also diminishing returns from over-optimizing a task. Be less perfect in the less important things so that you can focus on your most important goals and tasks.

3) Focus on progress, not perfection

No one starts off as an expert — everyone grows in expertise with time/effort

As I shared in part 2, perfectionism can often lead to procrastination. Perfectionists often have extreme expectations of a goal, and it causes stress and overwhelm — to the point that they procrastinate to avoid making mistakes.

Here you want to shift your focus to achieve progress, not perfection. Remember that everyone starts from somewhere — no one starts off as an expert.

This means rather than try to create a masterpiece right off the bat, aim to create a basic first draft. Rather than try to execute something perfectly, take an imperfect first step so that you can learn and improve. Break your goal down into a simple first step that you can work on right away. Improve as you go along.

For example:

• Writing: A perfectionist writer tries to write a perfect manuscript from scratch. Break it down → Write a simple first draft. Then improve on it.
• Organizing: A perfectionist wants to tidy their room but keeps putting it off. Break it down → Tidy a small section of the room first.
• Exercise: A perfectionist fitness goer aims to run 5 miles (8km) but skips their exercise sessions repeatedly as the target is too overwhelming. Break it down → Aim for 0.5 miles (800m) or even 0.1 miles (160m). Build it up from there.
• Video production: A perfectionist content creator wants to get high-end video equipment and the best editing software before working on their video channel. Break it down → Use a phone camera and a free editing app first to get things going, and then improve as they go along.

Focus on progress and take imperfect action, which will give you immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t work. The goal is to learn, iterate, and improve as you grow from beginner to expert. This will help you achieve your end goal in the fastest way — not by being hung up on a perfect vision and doing nothing in the meantime.

4) Set a cutoff for your tasks

The pursuit of perfection can be endless as a perfectionist keeps meandering in their task, trying to optimize everything. Set healthy boundaries for your tasks.

• Set a time limit. Set a reasonable time limit on when you should complete a task. This is important as tasks can technically take forever for a perfectionist if there is no time limit. By setting a duration, it reminds you when you’ve reached your allotted limit, and to speed up rather than waste more time on it.
• Create a checklist. Have a set of checkpoints and concrete deliverables to guide you on what to accomplish. For example, with creating a report, you may want to create an outline, type up the content, remove spelling errors, and clean up the formatting. Once the list is done, it’s done — don’t stray and get distracted by other things.

5) Challenge your need for perfection

For a perfectionist and their sharp eyes and meticulousness, there is always something to improve, something to tweak. If you find yourself second-guessing your work even though it is good enough, ask yourself, “Is it necessary to tweak this further? What’s the worst thing that could happen if it’s not perfect? Am I being productive here?”

Often the consequence is much less severe than you imagine, and you are just seeking perfection because of your own task maximization habit. Refer to Step 2 on aiming for good enough. Remember that there are diminishing returns and opportunity costs that come from micro-optimization.

It also helps to talk to someone about it, such as a colleague, manager, or friend. Get their perspective — are you being justified in your concerns, or are you being overly harsh on your work? Break out of the perfectionistic mind trap: it is easy to think that you need to do a litany of steps to complete a piece of work. But talking to someone, you may realize that the piece of work you are editing is already good enough and only needs 10 minutes of touch-up and not hours of work.

6) Understand the source of your perfectionism

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While I used to think that my neurotic perfectionism was just what it was, when I dug into it, I realized that my childhood and upbringing played a huge, if not formative, role in it.

In part 1, I shared that when I was a kid, I was in a primary school with strict, dogmatic rules about everything. These rules ranged from our hairstyles to attire to behavior. We could only wear hair ties and watches of a single color (black, blue, grey, or white). We were only permitted to wear our hair in a low ponytail, with no strand of hair touching our face. We were not allowed to speak in school at all, only when permitted to during class. Etc. 

In terms of studies, we were taught to aim for the perfect score (100/100), and made to feel inadequate when we didn’t. We were punished and made to slap ourselves every time we made a careless mistake. If we didn’t bring our books or finish homework for a class, we had to stand in the hallway and miss the entire class. Etc.

Any student who didn’t follow these rules would be shamed, berated, and punished in front of others. Boys would be subjected to caning.

It was the same when I was growing up as a kid in the traditional Chinese culture, where children are treated as lesser beings with no rights of their own. I was raised to be a quiet, obedient, and mindless child, to follow directives. Greet adults at all times. Do not talk back. Keep quiet unless you are spoken to. Etc. My mom in particular denied me from speaking as a child and would micromanage what I should say in the few times I was allowed to talk.

Then at a societal level in Singapore, there was an extreme fixation on achieving extrinsic success. (There still is today, but to a much lesser extent.) There was only one path in life: to achieve straight As, get a top job, earn lots of money, and buy a nice house and car. Failing which you would be seen as a failure and worthless person.

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Growing up in such a strict, oppressive, judgmental, and intolerant environment led me to be extremely meticulous about everything. It became like a fight-or-flight mechanism, to behave as instructed to avoid being heavily punished and having our sense of self-worth marred and destroyed.

The underlying basis of the culture, whether at the school or societal level, was, “A person is worthless unless they are academically and financially successful and can do as they are told.” So that was the belief I took away, that “I’m not good enough unless I’m highly accomplished and can do things perfectly.” It became an inherent habit to do things perfectly as part of my self-worth.

Yet is it true though? No, not at all. Following these rules did not determine my worth — only whether I could follow a long list of rules made by an authority figure. Many of these rules weren’t about helping us be better people too, but to create conformity.

As for extrinsic successes, it is great to achieve them, but a person’s worth isn’t determined by them. We are all worthy by virtue of our existence, by being here on Earth.

By understanding the source of my neurotic perfectionism, it has helped me understand that it’s okay not to be perfect all the time. That my need for perfection was due to my childhood story, where there was unnatural and toxic shaming and punishment for not doing tiny little things perfectly. (These things turned out to be inconsequential, with no bearing on my life.)

It has helped me recognize that my childhood upbringing was not okay or normal, and that children should never have been treated in this way (especially as I look at the situation as a mom today).

Finally, it has helped me see each situation as it is and to disconnect my past from the present. To evaluate each circumstance as it is and not mindlessly aim for perfection all the time, which is a drain on my time, energy, and mindspace.

To You

Maybe you think you’ve always been a perfectionist. But dig into it. When did your perfectionism first start? What happened to make you this way? What beliefs did you form from this experience? Are they true?

Understand, challenge, and correct these beliefs. Some examples of perfectionistic beliefs before and after correcting them:

• “I need to be perfect in everything I do to be considered worthy.” → “I am worthy, independent of my accomplishments. My worth is not linked to my success or accomplishments.”
• “If I make a mistake, it means I’m a failure.” → “Everyone makes mistakes. It doesn’t mean I am a failure. It’s more important that I learn and improve from them.”
• “If I don’t do things perfectly, it means I’m incompetent.” → “There are time and situational constraints and it is not realistic to do everything perfectly all the time. Focus on progress rather than perfection.”

(For those of you who have Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program, refer to Day 22: Examine Your Beliefs for my 3-step framework to rewrite limiting beliefs.)

7) Love yourself

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As a perfectionist, it’s easy to fixate on your goals and forget about yourself. The goal is all that matters and you just want to achieve the prize at the end.

But there is one person amidst it all — you. You are the most important person in the equation. If you are not working on your goals, then how can they be accomplished? If you are not around, then who is able to get everything done?

Don’t ignore and neglect yourself. Perhaps the biggest fault a perfectionist commits is self-neglect and self-abuse, because they prioritize their goals over everything else and forget their needs in the process. Bring yourself into focus and put yourself first.

• Prioritize your self-care. Set aside time for yourself while pursuing your goals. As you work toward them, pace yourself. Take breaks, rest, do things that you like, and fill up your tank. It will help you sharpen your saw and walk the longer road ahead.
• Watch the self-blame. Is there something you are beating yourself up for? A mistake from the past? Understand that you did your best with what you had then. Everyone makes mistakes and it is not your fault. Forgive yourself. Focus on what you can do now instead.
• Celebrate your progress. A perfectionist tends to focus on things that are lacking, that are not there yet. But this can lead to an over-focus on mistakes and errors, and a neglect of progress and achievements. Take some time to acknowledge what you have done and achieved. Celebrate your progress thus far, and use that to inspire you to grow and evolve. Read Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program, Day 13: Reflect on Your Past
  

  

• Switch to positive self-talk. Do you tend to berate and blame yourself when things go wrong? Can you change your self-talk to be kinder? For example:
  • “I’m not good enough.” Switch it to “I am enough. I am worthy and have my unique strengths.”
  • “Everyone is doing so well. I feel like a failure.” Switch it to “Everyone has their own path in life. I am on my own path and I am making progress.“
  • “I keep making mistakes. I’m not good at anything.” Switch it to “Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone starts from somewhere. Focus on learning from my mistakes and get better.”
  • I have created a set of affirmation wallpapers that you can use: 15 Beautiful Wallpapers With Positive Affirmations

8) Don’t subject others to the same standards

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In part 2, I shared that a perfectionist often ends up straining their relationships with others due to their immensely high and unwavering standards.

As you manage your perfectionism with this guide, apply Steps 1-3 and 6-7 to your relationships as well. In addition, don’t subject others to the same standards. Recognize that everyone is unique. Drop your expectations of others, and learn to deal with others at their own pace.

Why? If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will be boxed in by your expectations and spend the rest of its life thinking it is stupid (a quote often attributed to Einstein). Think of others as a fish, bird, squirrel, beaver, etc. — each with their own unique skills and talents, each with their own development path. They can be your friends, family members, or colleagues. Everyone excels in their own way and it may not be the same as yours. Be kind to them. Recognize their unique strengths and capabilities, and let them grow into the people they are meant to be.

Know that when you subject others to stiff and impossible standards, it causes constant stress and negativity as they try to live up to these standards but fail. It makes them feel bad about themselves and doesn’t help them be the best they can be.

Example: Perfectionist partner

• Perhaps a perfectionist wife may think of her partner, “He didn’t clean the kitchen sink again. He is always missing things.” This is negative and reproachful.
• Here’s a better way to think about things: “He helps out with housework even though he is busy with work. He is doing his part for the family. I will thank him later and clean the kitchen sink myself.”

Example: Perfectionist parent

• A perfectionist parent may think of their child, “He is making so many mistakes even though we have revised the topic before. He is going to fail at this rate.” This is cynical and dismisses the child’s potential and effort.
• Here’s a better way to think about this: “I can see that he is making the effort. He got half the questions right and this means he understands some concepts. I will engage a tutor to help him with his upcoming exam. Don’t pressurize him. What’s most important is that he tries his best.”

End Note

This marks the end of the perfectionism series and I hope you’ve found it useful. :) How has perfectionism affected you in your life? How can you apply the steps above? Let me know in the comments section. :)

This is part 3 of a 3-part series on the downsides of perfectionism and how to turn perfectionism into a positive force in your life.

• Part 1: 10 Signs You Are a Perfectionist
• Part 2: 6 Hidden Downsides of Perfectionism
• Part 3: How To Overcome Perfectionism: A Complete Guide

This series is available for download as an ebook. Click on the button below to download.

DOWNLOAD FREE EBOOK

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This is part 2 of a 3-part series on the downsides of perfectionism and how to turn perfectionism into a positive force in your life.

• Part 1: 10 Signs You Are a Perfectionist
• Part 2: 6 Hidden Downsides of Perfectionism
• Part 3: How To Overcome Perfectionism: A Complete Guide

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“If you are a perfectionist, you are your own worst critic.” — Unknown

“Perfectionists vary in their behaviors: some strive to conceal their imperfections; others attempt to project an image of perfection.” – Flett, York University

Perfectionism — is it really all good or does it have its problems?

On the surface, the life of a perfectionist appears aspirational or even perfect. Many accomplished athletes, celebrities, singers, and professionals are self-professed perfectionists. Yet perfectionism has its problems as I share below.

Hidden Problems of Perfectionism

There are two types of perfectionism — healthy perfectionism and neurotic perfectionism.

• A healthy perfectionist is driven by a desire for improvement and achievement while maintaining emotional well-being and flexibility. They are intrinsically motivated, set high standards, focus on growth not mistakes, and have a balanced approach in their life.
• An neurotic perfectionist is an extremist and strives for incredibly high standards at the expense of their well-being and relationships. They are driven by fear of failure, self-criticism, and unrealistic standards, leading to coping mechanisms like procrastination and an obsessive focus on details.

Without putting themselves in check, many perfectionists end up being neurotic perfectionists.

When I was a neurotic perfectionist, I thought I was getting the best out of myself and life. In reality, neurotic perfectionism hindered my productivity, well-being, and relationships. Here are six ways perfectionism could be holding you back in your goals and life.

1) Diminished productivity

Every perfectionist wants to get the best out of their life and be a top achiever. But paradoxically, a perfectionist often reduces their overall productivity with their focus on doing things perfectly. The 80/20 principle tells us that 80% of results in a task can be linked to 20% of our total possible input. Yet a perfectionist strives to achieve 100% perfection in everything — spending significant time and effort to perfect the last 20% of a task.

The 80/20 Principle

(Image: Personal Excellence)

What a Perfectionist Does:

(Image: Personal Excellence)

While it’s important to be meticulous and to perfect tasks of very high importance, obsessing over every detail of every single task diminishes productivity and prevents things from getting done efficiently. The time spent perfecting each task comes at the expense of other things you could be working on. There comes a point when constant tweaking gives you diminishing returns, or even negative returns.

Separately, setting unrealistic standards and being fixated on achieving them turns a perfectionist into a workaholic who sacrifices sleep, rest, and life for work. Instead of resting and filling up your tank so as to get energy and fresh ideas, you regularly push yourself past the point of optimal performance. This leads to reduced productivity as you constantly run on low energy and focus.

2) Procrastination

The second problem of perfectionism is ironically, procrastination on your goals and tasks. Have you ever put off doing something because you were waiting for the right or perfect conditions to do it perfectly?

For example, a video content creator may want a high-end DSLR, a lavalier mic, and the best video editing software before starting their video channel, rather than using what they have first and improving from there. A perfectionist with an exercise goal may target to run 5 miles (8km) per exercise session, and put off their sessions repeatedly because they don’t feel up to it.

You also have sky-high expectations of what needs to be done, making the goal or task seem bigger than it really is. This creates stress and overwhelm and makes you put off something again and again. At times you may even avoid or abandon a task (i.e., escapism) when it seems impossible to achieve your vision. To you, if you can’t achieve your vision, you might as well not do it at all (this is an all-or-nothing mindset).

3) Myopia – Missing the bigger picture

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As you get caught up in the little details, you miss the bigger picture and the bigger scheme of things.

For example, you spend hours refining the formatting of a report rather than focusing on the content. Or you spend weeks researching the best software for a project, unable to make a decision, while the project falls behind schedule. This obsession with perfection and little details causes you to miss the overall goal and objective.

You also experience frequent analysis paralysis, where you can’t make decisions quickly as you are caught up with making the “right” choice. You overanalyze every option and delay action to get everything correct and prevent error.

While such meticulousness is good for extremely large-scale goals with high stakes involved, this fear of making mistakes or a wrong choice, when applied to everything, prevents progress and results in missed opportunities, hence leading to stagnation.

4) Constant stress

Perfectionism also causes constant stress and anxiety. 

As a perfectionist, you are constantly overworking as you are always tweaking or improving something. You also have extremely high standards and a fixation to do everything perfectly. This leaves no room for mistakes or rest and makes day-to-day life very stressful.

What’s more, you refuse to delegate as you don’t trust others to do the work well. You also have difficulty letting go, always thinking about the tasks you should do and mistakes from the past — hence adding mental weight to your mind.

This overworking and constant stress and anxiety eventually leads to health issues and burnout. This is why research has shown that perfectionism is linked to stress, anxiety, insomnia, eating disorders, heart problems, digestive problems, and, in severe cases, suicide ideation.

5) Negative self-esteem

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Many perfectionists are their harshest self-critics. You are always pushing yourself and expect nothing less than the best. You blame yourself for problems and mistakes, wondering if things could have been better if you had done X or Y instead. You also beat yourself up over issues from long ago.

And when things go well, you take it as a given. Things that go well are taken for granted. If things go poorly, you beat yourself up endlessly. There is no room for rest and self-appreciation.

This constant self-blame and lack of self-appreciation mean negative self-esteem and a constant feeling of unhappiness, regardless of your accomplishments.

Lady Gaga, pop singer and winner of 14 Grammy Awards, said before, “I am perpetually unhappy with what I create. Even though I might tell you that ‘Edge Of Glory’ is a pop masterpiece, when it’s all said and finished there will be things I dread, and every time I listen to it I’ll hear them.”^[1]

Similarly, Michael Jackson, pop legend and known perfectionist, once said, “I’m never pleased with anything, I’m a perfectionist, it’s part of who I am.” Jackson’s extreme perfectionism contributed to his personal struggles and internal conflict, as he was never happy with his work. He died in 2009 from overmedication that led to a cardiac arrest.^[2]

Yet the whole point of pursuing our goals is to achieve personal satisfaction and be happy. If one accomplishes all these goals and is still unhappy with their work, then it makes you wonder: what’s the point of any of these?

6) Strained relationships

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Lastly, perfectionism strains and damages relationships.

As a perfectionist, you have very harsh standards and these expectations can spill over into your relationships. You may impose unrealistic expectations on others, causing frustration, tension, or even resentment. This can prevent you from seeing the value in others’ contributions or perspectives, causing you to miss out on collaboration, valuable insights, and positive moments with others.

For example, a perfectionist may criticize a partner’s cooking, focusing on minor flaws instead of appreciating the effort and enjoying the meal together. A perfectionist parent may criticize a child for not doing better on a test, instead of acknowledging the things that were done right.

Being a perfectionist also means putting your work performance at the highest priority, to the point of neglecting your relationships. You spend a large amount of time at work, leaving little to no time for friends and family. Because a perfectionist associates their worth with their performance, you get very stressed and upset when things don’t go well (which is often due to your immensely high standards) and bring work struggles into your relationships. At times you even lash out at your loved ones for no reason.

Such pressure weighs down on your relationships and makes people around you tense and unhappy. In the end, perfectionism hollows you out and pushes people away from you.

How Perfectionism Limited Me

As a neurotic perfectionist in the past, I was very focused on doing everything perfectly in my work and life, as I shared in part 1. It helped me achieve great results in my goals. Yet such perfectionism limited me in other ways which I didn’t realize then.

Productivity and Effectiveness

Perfectionism got in my way of being productive. By trying to do everything perfectly, I ended up spending too much time tweaking little things that didn’t play a role in the bigger scheme of things. This took time away from the things that really matter.

This issue became obvious when I started working. While in school I could get away with perfecting everything right down to the nitty-gritty, at my job the breadth and depth of the projects were so vast that it was no longer humanly possible for me to be deeply involved in everything and still do them perfectly. I would spend many late nights and weekends working, with no end in sight. It was just not sustainable.

The same issue cropped up in my personal development business, when my business grew and the online space became more complicated. My focus on perfecting things slowed me down — as I was trying to tweak some little thing every other minute, the competitors and online space would be racing ahead.

Mental Health

I was also extremely hard on myself for any mistake that I made, or anything that went wrong. In my mind, there was always an ideal scenario for everything. If a presentation, exam, event, etc. went against my expectations, I would mull obsessively over it and beat myself up for a period of time. If things went right, I would be thinking about how it could have been better. I frequently forgot about the accomplishments I had achieved before — I was always looking for ways to be better.

This was bad for my mental health of course. Deep down I was negative and self-loathing. I would cover this up with emotional eating (a separate issue that I cover in a different series).

Relationships

In terms of relationships, I was unwittingly alienating people around me, whether they were friends or family. Because I had such rigid and high expectations, I developed a hard edge which was intimidating to people. I was living within a wall and emotionally inaccessible to those around me.

With loved ones, I would focus on the things they were not doing well, rather than acknowledging what they did do or did well — due to my natural focus on fixing things and getting things “right.” This was unfortunate as deep down, I have always regarded people relationships as more important than external achievements.

I then worked on tackling my perfectionism and turning things around, which I share how in part 3.

How About You?

Can you relate to any of the above? What negative effects do you experience as a perfectionist? Let me know in the comments section.

Despite these issues, we can learn to manage perfectionism such that it doesn’t compromise our work, health, or relationships. In the last part, I share how to overcome the cons of perfectionism and live a productive, positive life. Read part 3: How To Overcome Perfectionism: A Complete Guide

This is part 2 of a 3-part series on the downsides of perfectionism and how to turn perfectionism into a positive force in your life.

• Part 1: 10 Signs You Are a Perfectionist
• Part 2: 6 Hidden Downsides of Perfectionism
• Part 3: How To Overcome Perfectionism: A Complete Guide

This series is available for download as an ebook. Click on the button below to download.

DOWNLOAD FREE EBOOK

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Note from Celes: Hey everyone, how are you doing? 🤗 I’m currently revisiting and updating the classics at PE, starting with the perfectionism series. In today’s post, I share why being a perfectionist may not be so perfect and my experience as a perfectionist.

This is part 1 of a 3-part series on the downsides of perfectionism and how to turn perfectionism into a positive force in your life.

• Part 1: 10 Signs You Are a Perfectionist
• Part 2: 6 Hidden Downsides of Perfectionism
• Part 3: How To Overcome Perfectionism: A Complete Guide

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Are you a perfectionist? Do you often seek to achieve perfection in everything you do? Do you feel a need to improve every single thing you do to the state of perfection, even at the expense of your well-being?

A perfectionist is someone who strives for perfection and sets extremely high standards for themselves. They have a strong desire to meet or exceed these standards in every aspect of their life, whether it’s work, relationships, or personal achievements.

In psychology, perfectionism is a personality trait characterized by “a person’s striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high-performance standards, accompanied by overly critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations.”^[1]

To a perfectionist, anything less than perfect is unacceptable.

10 Signs You Are a Perfectionist

Perfectionism can manifest in various ways, and those who have it often exhibit certain behaviors. Here are 10 signs you are a perfectionist:

1. You have extremely high standards. You have very high targets and standards for whatever you set out to do. Sometimes, they stress you out. You may spend many late nights and sacrifice sleep just to achieve them.
2. You are very critical of mistakes. You dislike mistakes or errors as they suggest imperfection — whenever you see a mistake, you are the first to correct it. Just knowing that there is a mistake that hasn’t been fixed yet irks you.
3. You have an all-or-nothing mindset. This is also known as black-and-white thinking. Either you do something to the highest level or you don’t do it at all. You also tend to see things in extremes — if something is not done perfectly, that means it’s a disaster. There is no in-between.
4. You are extremely meticulous and have a very high attention to detail. You focus on the smallest details of a task just to ensure that everything is in place. You spot mistakes when others don’t see any.
5. You are highly self-critical, even over little things. Whenever something goes wrong, you become really hard on yourself, wondering why you couldn’t have done it better and why you made that mistake.
6. You mull over outcomes that don’t turn out as planned, wondering if things could have been different if you just did X or Y. You also spend quite a bit of time analyzing and second-guessing decisions and actions after they were made, wondering if you had made the best choice.
7. You procrastinate just to do things at the “right” moment, or because you want to do things to the highest level. You sometimes put off tasks because the conditions aren’t perfect or you don’t feel like you can do them perfectly.
8. You have difficulty delegating to others. You find it hard to delegate tasks to others as you feel that they can’t do them as well as you.
9. You become defensive toward criticism and have a fear of failure, as they suggest that you didn’t do things well or that something is wrong with you.
10. You spend an immense amount of time perfecting things, even beyond healthy limits. Perfection is the end goal. You often sacrifice sleep, rest, and personal time just to bring your work to the highest level. To you, it is all part of achieving the goal.

Do you see these traits in yourself? How about the people around you?

My Experience With Perfectionism

I used to be quite a neurotic perfectionist when I was younger. In fact, all the 10 traits would fit me to a tee! I’m still quite a perfectionist today, though I’ve learned to dial down the negative aspects of my perfectionism (more in part 2).

A big part of my perfectionism is my inner drive and desire to be the best I can be. I always feel that when we do something, we should do our best without giving excuses. And while we are alive and on Earth, we should make the most out of our time here and put our best foot forward in whatever we do.

The second reason is my upbringing. I grew up in Singapore in the 1980s-2000s, and the culture and society then had an extreme fixation on conformance and adhering to an extreme definition of perfection.

This was particularly so in my primary school, where we were told to be the best and to aim for the best — anything less was not acceptable. I was in the best class and when it came to tests and exams, we were taught to aim for 100/100 (a worthy goal), but made to feel inadequate when we got less than that. We would be punished, reprimanded, and shamed when we made the smallest mistakes.

In terms of conduct, we were made to follow many strict, dogmatic rules, like only being permitted to wear hair ties and watches of a single color (only black, white, grey, or blue was allowed), or that we could only have specific hairstyles and not have any hair touching or covering our faces. It was questionable as to how these rules helped us become better humans. Not conforming meant being singled out, shamed, and punished in front of other students.

The fact that I have a high sensitivity to stimuli — something which I thought was common to everyone, but realized wasn’t when I grew up — further heightened my perfectionistic tendencies. I would experience external and internal stimuli (such as sounds, sights, and emotions) on a very deep level, and frequently observe details that many don’t.

These factors made me aim for the highest standard and be very meticulous in everything I do — i.e., a perfectionist. I would take this behavior to the highest level and become a neurotic perfectionist. This behavior extended to my studies, work, and relationships.

Examples of Perfectionism in My Life

Making Websites

For example, when I started creating websites as a teenager (as a hobby), I would spend late nights, sleeping just 1-2 hours some days, tweaking my sites to perfection. This included the content, graphics, and right down to the HTML syntax.

My sites had to look great at every resolution and on every browser; the content I produced had to meet the highest conceivable standard. I was constantly making little edits like tiny one-pixel changes and was very particular about how everything looked. It was an unbending, personal standard that I had set for myself.

Such efforts paid off, as my websites received over half a million pageviews a month. My visitors could recognize the quality of my work compared to others.

Gaming

Then as an avid gamer, I was always perfecting my playthroughs in each game. As a kid, my brother would criticize me if I made mistakes that resulted in the character’s death. 😑 This taught me to be very precise in how I executed each move and in achieving 100% perfection.

I fondly remember how I broke all the top scores in Crazy Taxi (a racing game) and completed every bonus challenge (some of which were insanely difficult). I played King of Fighters ’95 for months, perfected my attacking strategies based on the opponent, and won it many times at the hardest difficulty. In total, I completed over 100 games, from RPG to action to racing games, during my childhood!

School & Work

In university, I often took over project work due to teammates slipping on their tasks or just to improve the overall standard. I spent a lot of time perfecting the output, right down to the nitty-gritty. If it was a presentation, everything had to have a consistent look and theme, including matching font types, font sizes, and colors. If it was a report, all the content and formatting had to be seamless.

Even though it was at the expense of my time and rest, even though I ended up doing much more work than other teammates, the end result was worth it as we would get the best grade.

Then with my work at PE, I’m very meticulous about the content I create. For example, with each course, I spend many months creating and refining my course materials before launching it. After I conduct a live course, I would spend another few months improving it based on the participants’ feedback for that run.

I’m always thoroughly editing every article, podcast, and video before it gets published. Even then, I continue to tweak and improve my content after that. Perhaps this is why many readers appreciate my material and share it; teachers and professors alike use my material as part of their course curriculum.

The Result

Being a neurotic perfectionist helped me achieve immense results and become an overachiever in every area of my life. It helped me do well in school, perform well in my corporate job, and excel in many goals and projects.

However, as I grew older, I realized that neurotic perfectionism has its damaging effects as I share in the next part of the series. Read part 2: 6 Hidden Downsides of Perfectionism

To You

Are you a perfectionist? Can you identify with any of the signs? What do you think is the cause of your perfectionist behavior? Let me know in the comments section.

This is part 1 of a 3-part series on the downsides of perfectionism and how to turn perfectionism into a positive force in your life.

• Part 1: 10 Signs You Are a Perfectionist
• Part 2: 6 Hidden Downsides of Perfectionism
• Part 3: How To Overcome Perfectionism: A Complete Guide

Have you heard of the Shiny Object Syndrome? It is the tendency for someone to chase something new, be it a new idea, trend, or goal, rather than to stay focused on what they’re doing.

The behavior is similar to a child who is attracted to anything that’s shiny and new. I have an 18-month-old nephew and he is constantly attracted to anything that moves or makes a sound. As he approaches something that he has never seen before, he’s intrigued at first but loses interest as the item loses its novelty to him. He’s then attracted to the next new shiny thing, only to lose interest after a while and seek the next shiny object!

You know that you have experienced the shiny object syndrome if you can relate to the following:

• You have a list of business ideas but nothing gets executed.
• You constantly start new goals but never see them through to the end.
• You jump from one course to another, drawn by the wild claims of each course.
• You frequently jump from one goal to the next rather than stick to what you’re doing to the end.
• You keep registering new domain names and launching new websites, but you don’t work on building these sites.
• You have a collection of plugins and tools, but you don’t actually use them.

Does any of the above apply to you?

The Issue with the Shiny Object Syndrome

At the heart of it, the issue with the shiny object syndrome is distraction. Being constantly drawn to new ideas and tools, and abandoning important tasks in the process.

When you’re constantly distracted, a few issues happen:

1. You never get things done. That’s because you’re always on to something new, rather than completing your current plans.
2. You spend too much time on new ideas and fancy tools, of which 95% are noise, rather than building the fundamentals.
3. You become a jack of all trades, master of none. That’s because you don’t spend enough time to become good at something. There is a difference between a Beginner vs. Intermediate vs. Veteran vs. Expert, and you spend too much time being a Beginner since you’re switching focus and learning things from scratch all the time. This is different from developing a talent stack, which means being good enough in a variety of skills, hence giving you an edge over others.
4. Because you never get good enough at something, you never reap the market leader rewards. The market leader effect is the phenomenon where the winner takes all. Most people will only ever know the top leaders in each industry, and hence market leaders often enjoy a huge lead in market share over everyone else. When you’re constantly chasing new things, you spend too much time learning the basics rather than building on your skills. This causes you to miss out on market leader gains.

When you’re the best in your field, you enjoy significant gains over others — whether it’s monetary gains, brand name recognition, or opportunities (Image: Personal Excellence)

But when you are constantly attracted to shiny objects, you never have the chance to become great at something. You’re always climbing the learning curve for each new thing you chase. (Image)

How to Avoid the Shiny Object Syndrome: 7 Tips

So how can you stay focused and avoid the shiny object syndrome?

1. Understand that new does not mean better. To be clear, addressing the shiny object syndrome is not about ignoring every new thing. In today’s world, it is important to keep in touch with the latest trends and updates. However, when all you do is follow every new tool and idea, you waste your time chasing trends rather than getting things done. Understand that new doesn’t mean better. Just because someone just launched something new doesn’t automatically mean that it’s better.
2. Learn to see past the hype. There are constantly new, shiny objects in the online world. New startups, new products, new services. On social media, seeing raving reviews creates a mob mentality where you feel the need to jump in and follow what others are doing.
   
   But see past the hype. While people may brag about how great a product/service is, what’s good for others may not be good for you. Even though a company can promise the world on what their product can do, many startups, ideas come with birthing pains and issues. Rather than jump headfirst into something, question how it fits in with your priorities.
3. Assess its fit with your work (and life). Before jumping into a new idea or tool, assess its fit with your work and life. Don’t follow what others are doing just because it’s the hottest thing now — it’s not sustainable. Ask yourself,
   
   1. Is this what I really need?
   2. Will it add value to my work and life?
   3. What are the pros vs. the cons of doing this?
   Only do something if it’s what you need and it adds genuine value to your work and life. Just because others are doing something doesn’t mean you have to.
4. Improve your signal-to-noise ratio. The best way to manage distraction is not through discipline, but by managing the sources of distraction. When you are part of groups and newsletters that keep recommending new products, new offerings, it disrupts your focus and train of thought. You have to deal with the mental load of looking up each recommendation, assessing if it’s good for you, and making a decision about it. This is known as cognitive load, something that I mentioned in my How To Say No To Others podcast.
   
   Instead of filtering out noise which takes up precious mental energy, remove low-quality information sources. Evaluate your social media news feeds, Facebook group memberships, email subscriptions, and RSS feed subscriptions. What is your noise-to-signal ratio for each channel? Noise refers to information that’s irrelevant to you, while signal refers to information that’s useful and relevant. A high noise-to-signal ratio means the channel has a high proportion of unhelpful, irrelevant suggestions (noise) vs. helpful suggestions (signal). Unsubscribe from groups and newsletters with a high noise-to-signal ratio. Get your information from sources with a high signal-to-noise ratio instead.
5. Understand the concept of switching costs. Even though there are new tools released all the time, I only look into a new tool when (a) it has something that my current tools can’t provide, and/or (b) there are very strong reviews from multiple sources. Otherwise, I simply take a cursory glance at what’s available and return to my work priorities.
   
   One reason is that when you shop even though you don’t need anything, you’re invariably going to end up buying something. The second reason is switching costs, which are invisible costs incurred as a result of switching to something new. Switching costs can be monetary. They can be the time taken to learn a brand new system. They can also be the mental cost of changing your focus. When you keep switching to new ideas, new projects, and new tools, you are just incurring switching costs all day long and getting nothing done. Always factor such costs in when you are enticed by a new idea or tool.
6. Adopt a “wait and see” approach. When you’re unsure, it helps to adopt a “wait and see” approach. With rapid technological changes today, many tools tend to become obsolete after a couple of years. For example, many WordPress plugins are no longer supported or have died out. Products that claim to be the best often get replaced by better products one to two years later.
   
   My personal approach when I feel 50/50 about something is to wait and see. If it’s a new tool, I take the chance to look at the company’s background, preview the tool, and assess if I really need it. For new online tools, there are often integration issues and unknown bugs, and it can be costly to be an early adopter if you already have a live business with customers. Unless this is something that I need to use now and I have no other alternative, I find that “waiting and seeing” a much more prudent approach.
7. Differentiate between shiny objects and real opportunities. Last but not least, learn to differentiate between shiny objects and real opportunities. Shiny objects are things that look good and exciting, but are really distractions at the end of the day. There are many new products these days that look promising but don’t add value to your work and life. By the time you are done with it, you realize you have no need for that tool — after which you get distracted by another shiny object.
   
   Keep a watch out for real opportunities — and be ruthless in saying no to shiny objects. Real opportunities make a real impact in your work. For example, tools that dramatically improve your workflow. Tools that help you grow your business. Tools that help you better engage with customers. Tools that help you deliver better products and services.

Have you been distracted by shiny objects? It’s time to get your focus back on. Get clear on your big rock priorities, invest your 10,000 hours, and pursue ideas that make a real change. Let’s get a move on and work on our real priorities! :)

Read:

• How To Finish What You Start: 10 Important Tips
• How Social Media Creates a Fear of Missing Out (And What To Do About It) [Podcast]
• Busy vs. Productive: 7 Tips to Be Productive, Not Busy

About two months ago, I deleted my Twitter account @celestinechua. I thought I should write a post explaining this as some of you have been asking me about it.

My Issues with Social Media

First off you guys know my stance regarding social media. While social media used to be a great place for authentic conversations, it has become a very “noisy” commercial ground now. When I use social media as a content publisher, I feel like I’m just one drop in a very large ocean, where my comments have no impact whatsoever. There are just way too many — think hundreds of millions of — content creators on social media these days, with many using bots, digital assistants, and agencies to tweak every aspect of their social media messaging, so that they can get the best engagement and ROI for their posts.

This is vastly different than years ago, say 2011, when I was having many authentic interactions with readers on Facebook and social media had not become the monster that it is now.

These days though, my notifications on Facebook and Twitter are either spam, some commercialized plug, or some pointless alert. It has become very tiring to log into my social media accounts each day with a bright red alert showing XX notifications, only to sieve through and see that they are pointless updates. I have talked about these issues here: Why I Deleted My Facebook Page, Challenges I’m Facing Today [Podcast], and Fear of Missing Out [Podcast] (I’ve since reinstated my Facebook page after deleting it in 2016, but I no longer actively maintain it).

This is how I feel when I log onto social media and my inbox every day for the past few years (Image)

My Issues with Twitter

In the same vein, Twitter has become a frustrating experience for me in the past few years.

To begin with, most readers of PE do not follow me there. Many readers of PE don’t use Twitter, while those who do don’t connect with me there. I think Twitter has a specific demographic and most PE readers are just not active Twitter users. Users who want to get my updates sign up for my mailing list (which is the official channel to get my updates btw — I post stuff that I don’t post here, including new courses and special messages). For anyone wants to send me a message, the contact form is the way to go.

Next, when I looked at my Twitter followers — about 7,000 of them — I realized that (a) this number has not been growing for the past two years, and (b) 99.9% of them are inactive or “dead.” “Dead” in that the users no longer use their accounts, or are following so many people that users like me who believe in tweeting less, not more, can no longer be heard anymore. Out of these 7,000, maybe only three people actively read and reply to my tweets (hi Charles, Ted, and Rick!). It became clear that my Twitter follower count has become a vacant number. While I was meticulously maintaining my Twitter account daily for the past few years and thinking that I was reaching 7,000 followers with every tweet, I was really shouting into a black hole.

Following this, I then looked at my Twitter messages. Over the years, I began to receive a high proportion of empty alerts, such as notifications of some company bot tweeting out my articles and tagging me, usually done to increase exposure of their business. Messages from content creators trying to network, expressing manufactured interest in what I wrote — but in reality trying to network to promote their site/product/service. Nothing wrong with that, but when I check Twitter, I’m looking for authentic conversations with people who read PE, not networking requests and solicitation. These are things that I’ve dealt with immensely for the past ten years, and I feel like I’m at a stage of my life (mid-30s) where I just want to focus on creating content and living my life, not battle the same things I dealt with in my 20s.

Note that this issue is specific to me rather than most Twitter users. Running a popular website has made me the target of an enormous amount of spam and solicitation. When I looked at my issues with Facebook, blog comments, contact form, and now Twitter, it’s the same thing — an enormous amount of spam, noise, and empty comments because of my blog’s visibility. While I used to get a ratio of 100% authentic messages to 0% noise in my messages, now it’s more like 0.01% authentic messages to 99.9% noise.

Frustration vs. Inspiration

After thinking about this, I realized that the fundamental problem is that the social media and internet landscape has changed enormously since I started my website.

Conversations online used to be authentic because people were using the internet in an authentic way. These days, the internet has become massively commercialized, while abusers have a huge amount of power due to the democratization of technology and automation tools.

The answer, then, is to use social media in a way that enables me. I asked myself: If this platform is making me feel so frustrated when using it, should I continue using it then? The answer was clearly a “no.”

To be honest, I felt a little surprised by my answer. Because having a Twitter account feels so basic, so essential today, something that every business owner must have. Every time you sign up for a new service, you will invariably be asked for your Twitter handle (and Facebook page ID). Not having a Twitter account is unheard of. It feels blasphemous. It feels like you are some backward business owner who is not in touch with his/her audience.

But is it true though? Because even when I was managing a Twitter account with “7,000 followers,” I didn’t feel like I was reaching anyone. Every time I tweeted something, I felt like I was throwing a coin into an abyss. I didn’t feel this way in the early years of Twitter — it’s only so in the recent years as social media morphed into some giant, monster entity.

These days, I feel like everyone is shouting at the top of their lungs and commercial businesses have unlimited resources to micro-optimize every aspect of their presence, and social media is no longer the right place for me to connect with my audience: everyday people without a voice, people whom I want to speak to and help.

In short, Facebook and Twitter were good ways to connect with my audience from the late 2000s to early 2010s, but not anymore as they have morphed into totally different beasts that favor quick engagement and short-form conversation. I’ve grown tired of navigating these platforms’ ever-changing layouts and guidelines for outreach (particularly for businesses), often spending an exceeding amount of energy to maintain my accounts with very little return.

The net conclusion of having a business account with these giants these days is that there are too many creators (many focused on profit over value) with elaborate teams and assistants hacking the algorithms and getting their content seen by focusing on what the social media giants want (rather than what truly helps the user).

What I’m interested in is creating long-form, deep content on important life topics, and these are just not well-suited for their algorithms and landscape today.

“Death by a Thousand Cuts”

In retrospect, I should have closed my Twitter account much earlier. I feel like this is a case of “death by a thousand cuts,” which I feel is very common in today’s social media world. When something is unpleasant, if the unpleasantness is on a very small level, you will usually tolerate it. What social media giants have done today is that they deliver many little cuts slowly, over a long period of time. Tweaking the platform little by little, changing the rules every other day, altering the algorithm in a way that builds stickiness for them (but creates user fatigue), inserting little ads everywhere, and just making changes that maximize profit rather than create value.

Since these cuts are delivered little by little, most people don’t observe this. They continue to use the platform every day, addicted to it (an addiction that is carefully engineered by growth hacker teams). At the same time, the users start to experience other changes in their life: decreased productivity, mental fatigue, a general feeling of emptiness, but they have no idea that these are linked to their use of such platforms. So they stay on, getting sucked deeper and deeper.

I find this issue with Netflix as well — I tried using it for the past month as part of a free trial from another service, and I find that it employs highly negative, dark design patterns meant to suck the user deeply into the platform. Not surprising since this is what many modern-day giants are doing.

When it comes to digital platforms today, figure out your needs and use them in a way that supports your needs, rather than the other way round where you change your life to fit their ever-changing rules and guidelines. I share more in 6 Tips To Deal With Digital Burnout.

Endnote

At the end of the day, I’ve spent the past few years trying to make sense of my relationship with social media and online tools. I don’t want to jinx this but I think I’m starting to reach a good place regarding this.

I have my Facebook page but I don’t actively maintain it anymore because of the reasons stated here. I no longer have Twitter and I’m happy to have gotten rid of it. As a Facebook personal account user, I use it in a way that supports my needs. I have my newsletter list where I can connect authentically with you guys, where I get authentic replies to what I send out (thank you to all of you who have been participating in my surveys and sending kind messages through the contact form!). There are still negative bad eggs every here and there, but I’ve come up with tools and ways to manage and minimize them to a near-zero instance.

In the meantime, I’ve been busy working on my next course (on how to discover your life purpose), based on your feedback to my email survey sent out a few months ago. I’ll be sharing updates via my email list when it’s ready, so stay tuned!

Check out:

• How Social Media Creates a Fear of Missing Out (And What To Do About It) [Podcast]
• Why I Deleted My Facebook Page with 20,800 Likes
• Closing Blog Comments at PE
• Closure of PE Forums

It is so easy to be busy rather than productive in today’s world. With so many notifications and things screaming for attention, oftentimes, we could simply spend an entire day being busy without getting anything done.

So how can we focus on the impactful and make the most of our days?

In this episode of The Personal Excellence Podcast, I share

• 6 tips to be productive, not busy
• Why you should not start your day with chat [1:25]
• How to separate communication between inner circle loved ones and others [4:50]
• Why I turn off alerts and notifications [8:21]
• How to deal with incoming emails, alerts that you need to respond to [10:59]
• Starting your day with a priority to-do list [12:44]
• Why you shouldn’t beat yourself up when you go off task [14:49]
• Using batching to group similar tasks [17:07]
• How to create your 80/20 to-do list [20:32]
• Using a “Will do” list to defer incoming tasks [20:32]
• The importance of delegating [21:59]
• Why delegating was my Achilles heel in the past [22:42]
• 3 factors I used to determine when to delegate [25:05]
• 5 questions to ask yourself in a weekly/bi-weekly audit [29:16]
• Asking ourselves WHY, WHAT, and HOW as we live consciously [30:20]

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, Overcast, Castbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

The Personal Excellence Podcast

How To Be Productive, Not Busy

Show Podcast Information

Read the transcript for this episode here.

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How To Be Productive, Not Busy [Transcript]

Welcome to The Personal Excellence Podcast. The show that’s all about helping you be your best self and live your best life. Now, your host, Celestine Chua!

Celestine Chua: Hey everyone. That is Celes from PersonalExcellence.co. Welcome back to the podcast!

Today I want to talk about productivity — specifically how to be productive, not busy. I feel that in today’s world, it is so easy to be busy rather than to be productive. That’s because we have so many notifications, alerts, to-dos, things screaming for attention. Oftentimes, when we are not aware, when we are not conscious of it, we could simply spend an entire day just doing things, rushing from place to place, clearing item after item. But these things may not be the most impactful things that help us move towards our goals.

So today I want to share some simple tips, six tips in fact, on what we can do to focus on being productive rather than being busy.

1) Don’t start your day with chat

My first tip is don’t start your day with chat. It is very instinctual to want to open your chat application in the morning and see who messaged you. Thinking, What do I have in my chat inbox? What messages do I have? It feels exciting because you are getting messages from people, people you care about, or new people you just met. Also, it is sometimes like a little gift, like each message is a little gift and someone has a special message for you and you want to see what’s that. So I totally understand that.

But unless it is an off day where you are not working, for your work days, I recommend not starting your day with chat because it can easily derail your day into a series of chat exchanges where chat is your main focus, as opposed to what you need to get done. This is especially true if you are an entrepreneur, you control your day, you control your routine, or if you are a freelancer. It is very easy to have your entire day derailed because of chat or even because you are looking at your social media news feed. You know, the social media platforms today. I shared in a previous episode on FOMO, the fear of missing out, about how social media applications and platforms today are designed to get you to come back to the platform.

When you start your day with chat and this may be a chat application or a chat tool built into a social media platform, you have already entered their arena where there are all these design elements designed to get you to come back to the website. From the notification button color to the placement to the user interface, and so on. The best way is simply not going into chat at the beginning of the day. But instead focusing on the things you need to do.

Another reason is that at the beginning of the day, our energy is at its highest and you want to direct that to the highest purpose activities on your to-do list. As opposed to pumping that into chat because then you’ll be putting your best energy into chat messages and replies which may not be the best use of your energy.

There is an exception to this rule, which is if the person is a family member, an important loved one, like your partner or your kid. With these people, you should have a channel where they can easily access you. So this could be chat, this could be some other channel. That’s because there could be some urgent family matter or important issue where they need to notify you. Having this instant access lets you know if there anything that you need to tend to and so on.

This is where there is a conundrum. Because then you’ll be wondering, Oh okay, if I need to be easily accessible to these people, the problem is when I check messages from them, I will naturally see messages from others. My answer is to use two different chat applications. This is if you find that it’s worth doing that. Using two different applications: (1) One for your super important, inner circle loved ones. The people who need 24/7 instant access to you; and (2) The second for everyone else.

The good thing is there are so many applications today. Line. WeChat. Whatsapp. Facebook. Telegram. And so on. Simply designate one app to everyone else, I guess the default channel that everyone uses like WhatsApp and Facebook. And use a different channel that very few people use. Use that channel and allocate that to just your loved ones, like your parents or siblings or your spouse, your children. This way you have a separate channel that’s just for these people and you can use that without all these non-stop notifications, all these elements trying to pull you in. At the same time, you can still connect with the other people in your circle using the general application for everyone.

I do that and I find that super useful in helping me stay focused. Before that, I was just using one application for everyone when the one person I communicate with the most and I need to communicate with frequently would be my husband. I found that a lot of times when I was checking the chat application for his messages, I would naturally see the messages from other people. Some of these messages, in fact, most of the conversations were not essential. It’s like banter, casual banter, which is fine and good for socializing, but not to the extent where I need to see it all the time every day. The problem is when you log back onto these chat applications, you know that many of the social media tools today will show what time you were online and many of these tools don’t have a feature for you to turn it off — which is terrible. Then other people will see, “Oh you’re online, but you’re not replying to me. Why are you not replying to me?” And then that’s all this nonsensical stuff which is totally unnecessary.

So I find the best way is to simply use a different app for these inner circle people whom we need to communicate with on a very, very frequent basis throughout the day. And also with them, they understand that each of us has things to do. I have my things to do. You have your things to do. And our priority is to focus on these things. But at the same time, we check back this application throughout the day, just in case there are urgent matters, home matters, household issues, etc. that we need to see and deal with.

Another way that one of my ex-professors uses is having two different phone numbers. One number for close family members. Another for everyone else. That can work too if you are okay with using two different numbers or you have a dual SIM card phone. Otherwise, using the two chat applications,  that works pretty well.

2) Remove distractions

My second tip is to remove distractions. By that I mean the notifications, the alerts, all these different things that are so common and part and parcel of every application, software, website that we use or visit nowadays.

I find them very intrusive. I always turn off all these notifications and alerts. Whenever I install something new, if I have to install — So firstly, I rarely install new apps or software, only the essential ones. That’s very important, knowing the key things you need to have and saying no to everything else.

Then, with the apps that I do install, I will disable all the alerts, notifications, and so on. On your phone, there is an overriding feature in Android — I’m not sure in iPhone — where you can disable notifications. This is a phone-level setting, not a setting with the individual app. In the “Settings,” I think it’s there on most Android phones, there’s a feature in “Applications” where you can turn off notifications for each individual app. Doing so overrides the notifications for that app, if it doesn’t give you that option to turn off its notifications (which I find quite common in today’s applications).

So turning off these alerts. Email alerts as well. I don’t have email alerts. I only check emails at specific moments of the day when I’m taking a break from my core task. Because when I’m doing a task, especially a high-level task, just having this stream of incoming notifications, be in terms of SMSes or email alerts or any app notifications, I find them very disruptive and they often take my mind from a high-level mode to a very low-level reactive mode. When there are all these notifications going on, even if no active notifications right now, I don’t enter into high-level mode because I’m constantly sitting in wait for the next alert, the next message, the next notification. So I’m sitting there, in reactive mode, anticipating, Okay there could be a next alert, so I don’t want to enter into this high-level thinking mode where I’m thinking about ideas or writing an article and so on.

Some of you may be in positions where you need to be accessible all the time. For example, maybe you are an account manager at a PR agency and you need to be accessible to your clients. That is totally understandable. For these situations, I recommend designating fixed moments throughout the day where you check your messages, emails, return calls, and so on. This could be once every hour, at the start of the hour or once every 40 minutes. It could also be after you finish a task or a segment of a task. This way you introduce some structure into your days, as opposed to being in reactive mode 100 percent of the time.

You want to be clear on the Quadrant 2 priority tasks that you want to get done, while being responsive to the incoming alerts, the firefighting staff you have to handle as part of your job. In our job, it’s common to have a lot of Quadrant 1 tasks, which are the firefighting stuff, the urgent and important tasks. And there are the Quadrant 2 — the very important but never urgent tasks. We want to strike a balance between getting the Quadrant 1 tasks handled, and also having the time to work on the Quadrant 2 tasks that never become urgent but it is important to work on them to make significant headway towards our goals.

3) Have a priority to-do list

My third tip is to have a priority to-do list. Get clear on the 2-3 key things you would like to accomplish for the day for it to be rewarding.

As part of this priority to-do list, you can have other things that you need to get done too. For example, scheduling this doctor’s appointment or returning this critical email and so on. These are little tasks that may not be in the top 2-3 things you need to get done, but you need to get them done as part of moving things forward. But in this to-do list, you want to be clear of what are the 2-3 key things, the big rock items, that you want to spend a substantial or considerable amount of your time working on and make good progress in them.

When we don’t have a priority to-do list, it is really easy to spend our entire day working on 10 to 20 little things. But these 10 to 20 little things often don’t make a significant change or a significant dent in our Quadrant 2 goals in the long run. So we could be spending our entire day doing all these little things every day and constantly busy, thinking, I’m rushing and doing this and that, I’m multitasking, I’m doing all these different things. But that is not a good use of our time. If anything, when we are doing all these things, we are running in our rat wheels, as opposed to taking a good look at the tasks that require our time and energy, the tasks that we should be working on.

When trying to transit from this working on 10-to-20-different-things mode, to the work-on-2-to-3-big-items mode, we can often feel a lot of resistance. Because there’ll be all these things trying to pull us away from our priority tasks. All these things screaming for attention, firefighting stuff, seemingly super urgent critical stuff. I would recommend not seeing it as an absolute change that you need to make. Like, Oh, okay, I must just do these 2-3 big things and that’s all. I don’t want to do anything else. Oftentimes it is a transition that we do where, okay, we spend some time on the 2-3 big things. We know what they are. We spend some time on them. But there would still be the little things that come in.

Do what you can do. Do your best to hand those little things. Once you’re done, go back and focus on those 2-3 big items. See this priority to-do list as something to anchor you, to remind you of your priority to-dos. But don’t get pressurized or stressed by those things.

For example, if you don’t make significant progress on these things, or you don’t even get to spend any time on these things today, don’t beat yourself up, okay? Don’t feel bad about it. Because it’s really normal. It is super normal especially when you are at the intersection of a million to-dos and a million things demanding attention, to sometimes have days where you’re working on these million things as well. That’s fine. Just do what you can to get these things sorted out and then direct your focus back to your 2-3 priority to-dos.

That is the most important thing. Constantly making the effort to shift back to your priority to-dos, as opposed to taking it as an absolute standard that you have to follow. Because that can lead to a self-defeating mindset, a self-defeating situation where you feel bad, and you beat yourself up, and that isn’t what we’re going for here.

4) Batch similar tasks

My fourth tip is to batch similar tasks. Often times you will probably find a recurring pattern in the tasks that you do. And when you start seeing a similarity in certain tasks, it helps to batch them.

Batch them meaning, let’s say you need to return email number 1 and then, later on, you need to return email number 2, and number three, and number four, and so on. So as opposed to logging into your inbox every 5 minutes to return one email, I recommend batching all these tasks together. So you can spend 1-2 hours on a Quadrant 2 task, and then at a specific point in the day, log into your email and reply to all these emails together.

Another example is, say, you are a website designer. You are maintaining four different client websites. Say there are several changes that you need to make to website number three. And there are constantly new changes streaming in each day. Maybe it makes sense to batch all these little changes you need to make, and then make them at the end of the day or at a fixed moment of each day. As opposed to making no changes on an ongoing basis throughout the day. Because there is always a set-up cost involved for each task. Where you need to log into a certain interface, you need to key in certain details, you need to set your mind in that mode, and then you need to assess that situation and think about what you need to get done.

This setup cost happens each time you work on a task. When you have many little tasks for an overall project, and you keep repeating the same steps even if each time you are doing one small little task… Say you have five little tasks for this big project. This setup time quickly accumulates. Before you know it, you would have spent the entire day on this setup time and this “switching cost” where you’re constantly switching from task one to task two. Even if you are a superb multitasker, which I’m sure many of you guys are, there’s always this cost involved. Again like what I share in Tip #2 on removing distractions, you’re forever spending your time in this reactive mode, this low-level mode, where you are doing all these administrative switching things, as opposed to getting into the high-level mode where you are making significant changes.

So as much as possible, batching similar tasks together. This does require you to take a step back to evaluate and assess what are the tasks that keep taking up your time each day. Often times we are not aware that this is happening until we take a step back to write down the tasks that have been taking our time throughout the day, and start to see a similarity or trends in these tasks.

This is where having a “Will do” to-do list helps. In Live a Better Life in 30 Days, the task for Day 8 is to work on your 80-20 to-do list. For the to-do list,

• 20% high-impact tasks. I recommend having a column where you write down your 20 percent high-impact tasks, i.e. the tasks that will make the biggest impact, that will be the best use of your time for the day. This would correspond to the priority to-do list in Tip #3.
• 80% low-impact tasks. Then have another column which consists of your 80 percent low-impact tasks, and these will be the tasks that need to get done, the little tasks that are not the best use of your time but need to get done.
• Will-do tasks. And then another column which would be the “Will do” to-do list where you write down the tasks that stream in throughout the day and you need to get them done. But you don’t need to do them right away. Oftentimes a lot of the things that we think what we need to do right away, we don’t really need to do them right away.

Putting them in the “Will do” column and then assessing them at the end of the day and tending to them, helps us see the similarity in these tasks and batch them so that we can deal with them more effectively.

5) Delegate

My fifth tip would be to delegate. Now I know that this tip wouldn’t be applicable to those of you who are not in a position to delegate. But for those of you who are, maybe you are an entrepreneur, or you are at a managerial position, or you’re working in a team where the other co-workers handling different tasks, then it is important to learn to delegate. Even if you are not in the position to delegate right now, there will likely be a time in the future when you move to a different position in your career or you move up the value chain in your career ladder, where you would need to learn to delegate.

I have to say that delegating has always been my Achilles heel because firstly, I like to be hands-on. I like to be in the thick of the things that I’m working on. I will say that I’m a creator. I get the satisfaction of creating stuff and you guys can see that. Like with my entire website, Personal Excellence, I’m very hands-on. The entire website is built by me and so on. When I delegate, I stop working on that particular stuff that I’m delegating. That removes one small piece of satisfaction because the creation process is where I get a lot of satisfaction.

The second reason is that I don’t like to trouble people. I don’t like to implicate others or burden people with my problems. I just like to handle things myself and internalize and deal with them as much as possible.

So for a long time, I just didn’t like to delegate. I would just do everything myself as much as I can to the point where I would feel like bursting. But I have found that delegating is an important skill. It is a crucial skill if you want to do much more than you are able to with your own bare hands. Because we can never accomplish as much if we are always relying on ourselves. We can always do more when we have an extra set of hands helping us. We can always do more when we have two different brains working on a problem.

This is something that I took very long to learn. Nowadays I’m learning to do that more. Delegating, identifying which are the parts of my business where I should delegate and let someone else handle and help me in them, while I work on the higher-level stuff that is the best use of my time.

With regards to delegating in my business, I have three factors that I use to evaluate whether I should consider outsourcing or hiring.

1. Repetitive. Is this task repetitive? Is it highly recurring? If it is highly recurring, it has a high frequency, that means I should potentially look at hiring someone to handle this.
2. Value of the task vs. my time. Is it the best use of my time? Or can my time be better spent elsewhere? When you are running a business and as your business matures and as your customer base grows, you start to be involved in many, many different tasks of many different functions. So you could start your business and many things are important. But there will be a point where there are just so many tasks and many things are important, but it’s just not possible for you to handle everything. And that will be certain tasks that are more important than others and that are a better use of your time.For example, in my business, there could be marketing, editing, audio editing, video editing, site maintenance, content creation. And all these things individually by themselves are important. But is every task the best use of my time? Or can my time be better spent elsewhere? And it is a very critical question because unless we consciously evaluate the value of our time and whether this time can be better spent on Task A or B or C, we will forever be in this mode where we feel that everything is important and everything deserves our time.But when we stack up all these tasks side by side, it becomes clear that there are certain tasks are a better use of our time than other tasks. And these tasks that the best use of our time, oftentimes they are the critical aspects of our business and our work. And us putting energy into them can create the biggest rewards.
3. Pros vs. Costs of hiring. The last factor, whether the pros of hiring outweigh the costs. Because there will always be a cost involved when you’re looking at hiring or outsourcing. Now if you’re delegating to someone in your team, in the company that you’re working in, then the cost element wouldn’t really be applicable. But if you are a business owner or entrepreneur, then the cost element would be involved. Even if say if you are delegating something in your personal life — so you could be working in a company but you are looking at delegating aspects of your personal life, say household cleaning, grocery shopping, or potentially getting a helper, then the pros need to be weighed against the costs and whether it’s worthwhile.

When you’re dealing with something that is highly repetitive, is not the best use of your time, and the pros of hiring outweigh the costs, then you should look at kickstarting the hiring process. It can be pretty difficult to get good talent, good people to help you or good services to help you. In some cases, it may not be hiring someone as much as you are engaging a service to help you in that thing.

But once you find someone who can help you or a service that can help you, you will find the rewards tremendous. Because now you can take a load off your shoulders and dedicate your mind space, your time, your energy on the things that truly would be the best use of your time.

6) Do a regular audit

My sixth and last tip is to do a regular audit. Audit meaning you look back at how your week has been and you ask yourself:

1. How has this week been?
2. Am I satisfied with how I’ve spent this week?
3. Have I spent this week on the most important things on my task list?
4. Could I have spent this week in a better way?
5. Moving forward what changes would I like to make, if any?

Asking yourself these questions can be very helpful because oftentimes we are just heads down in our work, our tasks, trying to complete item after item. We often don’t take this step back to get a macro focus on what we are doing, how we are doing things, whether that’s a better way for us to do something. Without this audit, we can forever be stuck in this micro mode, just rushing from place to place, finishing task off the task. Before we know it is already been weeks and weeks or even months, and we look back and we wonder, Where has all this time gone?

Doing this audit helps us take a step back and think about these three points:

1. WHY. Why are we doing this? Is this the best use of all time?
2. WHAT. The things that we are doing. Are these truly the best use of our energy? Are these the things that will be moving us towards our highest goals?
3. HOW. The way that we are doing things, the approach that we’re using right now, is this the best approach? Can there be a better approach? Can there be a better way to do things?

So you can do an audit every week, every two weeks, or even every month. But the point here is to do an audit. Use the audit as a chance to evaluate how you have been spending your time, because it is so easy to be stuck in work mode, busy mode, and spend all the time that way without really thinking about whether this time has been spent effectively. An audit is this chance, this opportunity where we can take that step back to really think about how our days have gone, how weeks have been spent, and whether we can do things in a different way.

Closing Note

Productivity is when we are consciously spending our time. Consciously approaching our days and thinking about how we can make the most out of it.

Busy, in a way, can be considered a lazy way of living. In that, you’re not really thinking about the things that you’re doing as much as you are just doing them.

While it is very important to have a good work ethic, which is what being busy is about, you want to make sure that your time is being spent in the most impactful way. This is what productivity is about: Working hard, while at the same time making sure that your hard work is creating the highest impact. Making sure that your energy and your efforts are creating the biggest impact in the world.

So that’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening. I have an article that shares more tips on how to be productive versus busy that you can check out in the show notes. I’m going to link that in the show notes, along with links to some other resources related to today’s podcast.

If you have found today’s podcast helpful, I would super appreciate it if you can leave a review on iTunes. You can do that at personalexcellence.co/itunes. Every review goes a long way to helping the podcast to grow and towards spreading the message of conscious living further.

I want to take this chance to thank all of you guys who have posted such positive reviews and sending such wonderful feedback to me through the contact form. I read everything single one of your messages and I’m so grateful for your support. So thank you so much to you guys. You guys know who you are.

So that’s it. Until next time, remember: you are beautiful, you are perfect, you’re perfect the way you are. Talk to you guys in the next episode. Bye guys and have a great week ahead. :)

Endnote: Thanks for listening to The Personal Excellence Podcast! For more tips on how to live your best life, visit www.personalexcellence.co

Related Resources:

• Busy vs. Productive: 7 Tips to be Productive, Not Busy
• How Social Media Creates a Fear of Missing Out (And What To Do About It) [Podcast]
• Put First Things First
• How To Achieve More With Less Using The 80/20 Principle
• Is Your Goal Worth 30 Minutes of Your Time Every Day?
• Live a Better Life in 30 Days, my course to live a better life in 30 days

FOMO — or the fear of missing out — has become a pattern in today’s world. We are constantly on our phones, glued to social media feeds and checking what other people are up to. The more updates we see, the more anxious we feel. We see people living this exciting life, achieving this new milestone, doing that exciting activity. We feel like we are missing out, that we are not living a good enough life, and we have a compulsion to keep up.

So we keep up… buying, keeping up, and absorbing as much information and updates as we can. And this addresses our anxiety… or does it?

Can you relate? Well, today’s episode is just for you. :) In this episode of The Personal Excellence Podcast, I cover

• What is FOMO [0:29]
• Signs of FOMO [1:27]
• 4 reasons why FOMO exists [4:39]
• 5 strategies to tackle FOMO [15:06]

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, Overcast, Castbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

The Personal Excellence Podcast

How Social Media Creates a Fear of Missing Out (And What To Do About It)

Show Podcast Information

Read the transcript for this episode here.

If you find The Personal Excellence Podcast helpful, please take a minute to leave a nice rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. Your rating makes a difference and will help spread the message of conscious living to more people out there. Thank you! :)

Fear of Missing Out [Transcript]

Welcome to The Personal Excellence Podcast. The show that’s all about helping you be your best self and live your best life. Now, your host, Celestine Chua!

Celestine Chua: Hey everybody, welcome to The Personal Excellence Podcast! This is Celestine Chua from PersonalExcellence.co. Today we’re talking about the fear of missing out, otherwise known as FOMO.

Have you heard the term FOMO before? I’m sure some of you have. But if you haven’t, FOMO refers to the apprehension that one is not in the know, or one is out of touch with some event, experience, or interaction. This compels the person to constantly want to know what’s going on, what’s happening out there, and whether they’re missing out on something.

In today’s world, FOMO exists on some level in many of our social media habits and online behavior — even if you don’t realize it. This is why I want to discuss this topic today because I feel that FOMO has become such a prevalent issue.

Some Signs You Have FOMO

Some signs of having FOMO include

• Continually refreshing your social media newsfeed to see what’s going on, what’s the latest update, and the new things that people are discussing right now.
• Feeling the need to know what so-and-so people are doing. This can include the people in your social network. It can also include the people you don’t know, such as celebrities or famous people.
• The constant feeling that you’re not satisfied with your life, and because of that you keep looking outward at what others are doing.
• Feeling that perhaps you are not doing enough.

So as opposed to enjoying your time right now with the people you are with and the life you have right now, you are constantly checking and seeing what others are up to, because you feel that otherwise, you may be missing out.

Why FOMO is Unique to Our Era

I feel that FOMO is a phenomenon that’s unique to our digital era. FOMO as a term was coined in 2003 and it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013. That’s just a few years ago. So why is FOMO unique to our era?

Imagine in the past, way before the internet was invented. Say it’s a Friday night and you just finished work. What do you do?

Perhaps you would read a book. Perhaps you would do some simple activities. Maybe you like to knit so you knit. Maybe you watch a video of your favorite movie. Or you have a quiet conversation with a loved one. So you do that and you sleep. And you could be feeling pretty satisfied with your Friday night, doing something that you like.

Nowadays, everybody is connected. You can see what anybody is doing and everyone’s updates. With the Internet today, typically what happens is this: It’s Friday night. You could be browsing your social media newsfeed and your Instagram newsfeed.

• You see this professional coach or guru going to some event, achieving some new level of success, getting this new interview, living the high life.
• Or you see this celebrity, this person partying at some gala event, living in some mansion, doing some new photoshoot, or having some brand new product launch.

So you could be excited and feeling satisfied with your Friday night, reading a book, knitting, talking to a loved one, whatever it is. But now you are left feeling like you’re boring and lousy because you’re not doing all of these things that these “exciting” people are doing. And that, in essence, is FOMO.

4 Reasons for Fear of Missing Out

I see FOMO as the result of a few factors.

1) Prevalence of Fast-Speed Internet

First, the wide prevalence of fast-speed Internet. It’s incredibly easy to get information today. In the past, when the internet was new, it was slow and we were on dial-up modem. Some of you guys may still be on dial-up.

But in the past, dial-up was the norm. Over the years, as the government, societies build up the infrastructure, high-speed internet became more easily accessible and at a lower cost. Many people around the world have fast internet today.

So you can easily get information at the click of a button. With that, you can easily see what people are doing with the click of a mouse. What Brad Pitt is doing right now, what Angelina Jolie is doing right now, what the Kardashians are up to. All this information, just easily accessible at the click of a button.

Because of that, you can instantly know what others are doing. This starts this whole comparison cycle and behavior because now you can easily compare and put side-by-side what other people are doing and what you are doing. This starts to create a feeling of lack, a feeling of inferiority, that maybe you’re not good enough.

2) People displaying a perfect version of their lives

The second factor would be people using the Internet to exhibit their best selves. Along the way (in the 2000s), the Internet became this platform where people get to share about themselves. But now, instead of people sharing about themselves, people are using the Internet to exhibit a very manicured version of themselves. Sometimes this version may not even be true to reality.

So there’s a very heavy level of self-monitoring and self-altering behavior going on.

We have magazines out there isn’t it? In the media industry, with the magazine editors heavily photoshopping magazine covers, they create this “picture-perfect” version of beauty and very narrow definitions of beauty. That’s the magazines and it’s enough that media industry is doing that.

But now, instead of this being an issue isolated to magazines (and the media), we have people everywhere on Instagram, Facebook, etc. editing the photos that they upload. Instead of it being an authentic moment — which it used to be, where people were genuinely sharing what they were doing as part of connecting with others — now it’s become a situation where people are sharing very edited, manicured, and perfected versions of what’s going on in their lives.

So they could be living their day and essentially doing mundane activities — as with most people living their lives. Some of the things they’re doing will be mundane and usual, nothing to shout about. Then they have this one hour when they are doing something exciting, and then they will take some pictures of that and edit that, make them perfect, add filters, and so on. And just highlight those moments.

When you have people everywhere doing this online, it creates this impression of, Oh this is what’s happening in everybody’s life all the time. So I’m missing out! My life is not good enough! This creates a really skewed and warped sense of reality.

3) Existing social issues magnified by Internet

The third factor contributing to FOMO is there are simply existing (social) issues that the Internet exacerbated. As opposed to the internet creating problems, I would say there were existing problems such as loneliness or low self-esteem. The Internet, with the way it has brought the entire world closer and stripped away many boundaries, exacerbated this issue as we no longer have a strong sense of boundary or space. People who already feel lonely or low in self-esteem may feel more isolated, while people who felt slightly lonely at times may have this feeling magnified in the presence of everyone else’s success and “exciting” life.

4) How today’s websites are designed

The fourth factor contributing to FOMO is how companies have designed their websites.

To understand how this works, it boils down to this underlying principle. Essentially, most companies operate on profit. Well, the essence of a company is to be profitable because if you’re not profitable, you’re out of the game.

When companies focus on profit as their sole objective — without regard for their audience and adding value to their lives — their number one goal becomes to maximize each user’s time spent on their website. This is particularly true for platform companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, Instagram. The more time you spend on their site, the better it is for them, the more advertisers they can get, the more revenue they can get.

What’s the best way to maximize the time spent? By maximizing interaction, maximizing the number of engagements you (as the user) have on their site, be it by making you click from one place to the next within their site. Whatever keeps you within the site and gets you clicking, interacting, commenting, and spending as much time as possible on the platform itself — whether it’s Facebook, Snapchat, or Netflix — even if it’s to the point of detriment of your well-being, your productivity, or the utility value you’re getting from the website.

This is particularly so when a company starts to focus on profit and what it gets off its user base rather than having the users’ best interests in mind and designing its services around them. This is where profit supersedes value — where companies focus on profit rather than giving value, as opposed to creating value as the priority and earning profit as a result of that.

So platforms are now creating site designs to build addiction. We have Facebook — or any of these large attention companies really — having large teams of growth hackers, where their sole job every day is to get together to discuss, find ways to hack your brain, and figure out how to break down your mental barriers, so that you’re constantly glued to their platform. Getting you to stay on their site, making you feel compelled to come back, and making you feel, Oh I’m missing out if I’m not coming back to the site. I’m missing out if I’m not clicking this notification.

So it could be

• Facebook popping up a message and saying, “You haven’t been here for a while” or “You haven’t posted on your page for a while. Do you want to interact with your followers (if you have a Facebook page)?”
• Snapchat. They introduced a streak feature in the past couple of years where they encourage you to continue this streak of messaging someone consecutively each day or over a period of days, so that you can maintain the streak.

Some of these are questionable. Because, okay, Snapchat has this streak feature to message this number of times or this frequency with someone. But does this help forward your relationship with that person or help you live a better life? These are questions to ask ourselves.

So we have these companies coming up with all kinds of strategies. Many of them implicit — you don’t know they are happening unless you take a step back to think. Or unless you run a website yourself, where you become conscious of these issues. Ultimately, they are there to suck you in. To get you addicted. To make you feel like you’re missing out. Hence, the feeling of “missing out.”

So you constantly refresh your social media feeds to see what you are missing out. You feel, Okay! When I refresh and the thing is loading in my browser, I’m doing something with my life. Something is happening and I’m seeing all these updates! The page is now loaded, you see this barrage of new updates. Okay! Now I feel marginally fulfilled. Then 30 seconds later, you are back doing the same thing, loading the webpage and seeing the next wave of updates.

Social Media Updates — Junk Food for the Brain

All these are very much what I call, junk food for the brain. It’s like you eat junk food, and maybe for a few seconds, you feel satisfied. After a while though, you feel, Hey I need more! Like, This is not satisfying me.

Why is that? It’s because these little pieces of updates are inherently not satisfying or nourishing. Junk food is not nourishing for our body. Media news sites and the attention companies, or any of these websites using these strategies to maximize attention and it can include content mills with very low-quality articles, designed to make you click from one thing to the next — these are junk food for the brain.

When you have all this junk food content and you’re consuming it, the quantity may be huge and there may be many pieces of such content everywhere. But because it’s not nourishing for the brain, you have to keep clicking and refreshing and returning just to keep this “nourishment “going. Because it’s so ungratifying, you’re not being fulfilled, and hence you need to do it so many times.

Compared to if you are reading a piece of high-quality content, you can be just reading a short amount and that’s food for thought. There’s something you have gained, that makes you think for the next few days.

So these four factors contribute to the phenomenon of FOMO. Even in the online business world, FOMO has created the shiny object syndrome. Where you feel this need to constantly buy that next app, that next plugin, that next web service, hoping that you’ll create that next big breakthrough in your business. I’ve shared before in an article on the magic bullet — there’s no secret sauce or magic thing that’s going to transform or create some huge results. Ultimately, it’s back to the same fundamentals and it boils down to the strategy that you use and how you approach your business.

5 Strategies to Tackle FOMO

So how can you tackle FOMO? I have 5 strategies.

1) Stop comparing yourself to others

Stop comparing. I know it is difficult because all this information about people’s lives is everywhere, and social media companies have made it so easy for us to access this information. When you come online, you have all these companies hungering to grab your attention, even if it’s to the detriment of your productivity. You have all these companies fighting and eliciting you to, “Come and click, come and click over to my website.” It becomes really difficult because you are fighting all these forces: the macro forces and also the internal force in you, where perhaps there is a sense of dissatisfaction or feeling that, Okay, maybe there’s something out there that I need to know.

So I know it’s difficult, but it is important to stop this behavior from within. This can include limiting your social media usage and controlling the way you use social media which I’ll talk about in tip #3.

With regards to not comparing, two episodes back I talked about our unique path in life. In that episode, I talked about how everybody is on a unique path. You are on your unique path. I am on my unique path. We are all on our unique paths in life. Don’t feel like you need to compare because perhaps you’re not making the best of your life.

Sure, you can benchmark. Benchmark meaning you reference and look at what others are doing as an indication of what you could be doing.

But don’t compare in that you keep looking towards what other people are doing as the reference point for where you should be. Because we are all different. We all have our unique paths. We have our individual aspirations, our individual paths to realize.

You can be the fastest swimmer on Earth. If you keep looking at the bird in the sky and wondering why you can’t fly, you’re just putting your God-given talents in swimming to waste. This is the same between the bird and the swimmer. The bird can be in the sky flying, with the ability to fly and soar, but instead, it looks at the fish in the sea and wonders why it can’t swim.

So the fish gets to explore the wonders of the marine world. The bird gets to explore the wonders of the sky. Everybody is on their individual path to self-actualize and self-realize, and this path may not be comparable in many instances because it’s just unique.

Unfortunately, we live in a society right now with the tendency to diminish and condense people to a metric, and try to simplify human worth or value to some number or statistic. But there’s something for you to keep in mind: We are not statistics and we should not be condensed to a number. Even if society or government or media tries to do that to us, we are not that. Each of us is unique and we are unique individuals on our unique path to contribute and create massive value to the world.

Always remember that and don’t compare yourself to other people. Don’t try to alter yourself or shape your life so that it looks like other people’s lives, because you have your life and you are your unique individual, and it’s about embracing that.

2) Fill your schedule with meaningful activities

My second tip is to fill your schedule with meaningful Quadrant 2 activities. I talk about this in my article Put First Things First. It refers to the activities, tasks, and goals that are the most important in your life, but not necessarily the most urgent.

Why aren’t they the most urgent? That’s because the most important things in our life rarely become urgent until it’s too late. They include our health, our relationships, our biggest life aspirations. Fill your schedule with meaningful Quadrant 2 goals or tasks, whatever they may be. This requires you to take a step back to really think, reflect, and ask yourself:

• What are my Quadrant 2 goals?
• What are my most important life goals?

For those of you with Live a Better Life in 30 Days, many of the tasks (especially in Week 1) are about goal setting. Assessing your life right now. Identify what is your ideal life, your ideal goals. Creating a life map and your vision board. And so on. All the 30 tasks in the program are meant to get you to think about the different Quadrant 2 aspects of your life. For those of you with the program, review the tasks inside, and start thinking about your Quadrant 2 goals.

When your life is exciting and filled with meaningful Quadrant 2 activities, you will automatically not be interested or very interested to see what other people are doing. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t know what others are doing. To do that would be to isolate yourself from the world and that is just swinging from one end to the other. But you won’t have this constant or unhealthy compulsion to keep seeing what other people are doing and filling your life with this filler information. Because you are living your life. These Quadrant 2 activities could be, say, being with your parents. Having a meal with them. Being with your loved ones. Social activities. Volunteering work.

One of my recent coaching clients went on a six-week volunteer trip in Taiwan. He’s from Australia. He was in this rural village at a homestay, taught at a rural school, and ran some conferences. From this trip, he gained so many insights about his future goals, what he wants to do for the next 10 years and beyond, and what he wants to do as his life direction. That’s because the work was inherently fulfilling and it was something that he was personally interested and passionate about. Pursuing and doing this gave him insights on what he would want to do in the future. That was a huge Quadrant 2 activity. He could have spent these six weeks in a frivolous way or just doing nothing — which is fine too because sometimes relaxing or taking time out for ourselves is important. But he could have just wasted six weeks away. Instead, he used it in a meaningful way, in his own definition. That helped him gain so much insight on what he wants to do for his long-term goals, his 10-year goals, and his future life direction.

Quadrant 2 activities can also include exploring a new place you haven’t been to before. Learning a new skill. Doing something you like, whatever it is.

So fill your schedule with these meaningful activities, as opposed to filling the entire day with refreshers of your social media newsfeed or what Kylie Jenner is doing. Ultimately, this won’t fulfill you. But taking action on your personal goals in life? That’s going to fulfill you.

3) Cut down on social media usage

My third tip is to cut down on social media usage. I mentioned just now that the Facebook newsfeed is like fast food for the brain. Tickles you and keeps you busy. May taste well in the first bite. May even make you think that you’re satisfied. But there’s nothing much there and it will ultimately kill you in the long run.

That’s why people need to keep refreshing and seeing their newsfeed so regularly. Because it’s inherently not fulfilling. That’s why they need to keep seeing it over and over and over again, hoping that it will bring a different result each time — except that it doesn’t. It’s not much different from pulling the slot machine at the casino. In fact, many elements of Facebook and a lot of these leading social media sites today are designed with reference to the addictive elements of a casino or gambling dens.

To avoid being in this negative spiral, limit the time you spend on social media. Think about it: when you are in Facebook — and I’m using Facebook as an example, but it can be any website with the agenda to maximize a user’s attention without taking into consideration their personal goals and life. So you could be in Facebook’s “walled garden,” and this is a common term used to describe the way Facebook has designed their site. It’s like a “walled garden,” to keep you inside their universe and away from the outside world. Once you step into Facebook’s “walled garden,” it becomes an uphill battle to gain control of your conscious self and you have lost the game. Because now you’re up against this seemingly innocuous but very meticulously and strategically designed website, designed to suck you in and get you to stay there as long as possible.

The best way to avoid this is to limit the time you spend on social media. 30 minutes, 10 minutes, I don’t want to set a specific time limit because it depends on why you are using social media, whether there’s something you need to get out of the site at the moment. It could even be not using social media on some days. So it is subjective. But the underlying principle is to limit the time you spend on social media. Because when you step inside, you’re going up against 100 or 1000 different strategies put in place to suck you deeper and deeper into the site. Because all of us have a limited amount of mental energy per day, it becomes a downward spiral. It very quickly drains you, and soon you find yourself in this loop where you are just refreshing and seeing the next new update and so on.

So, limit the time you spend. And remove notifications except for crucial ones or for crucial apps. Most websites and mobile app notifications today, they’re useless. They don’t serve a role in our life except to get you to go back to the app. They don’t tell us about anything important or significantly urgent. You can check these apps once in a while, whenever you remember to. But there’s no real need to have notifications alerting you every single time someone messages you or some update is rolled out. This is a call that you make, but I personally feel that most notifications today don’t have a role and they are not really useful.

4) Stop following people who promote an unhealthy lifestyle

My fourth tip is to stop following people who promote an unhealthy lifestyle. Again this requires you to be conscious of how you are using social media and how you’re approaching your Internet usage. Take a step back and evaluate the people you follow and the kind of lifestyle and messages they promote. This includes people on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, websites and so on.

As you are doing that, ask yourself:

• How do you feel when you see the updates?
• Do you feel inspired or do you feel bad or negative about yourself?
• Does it make you feel like you’re not doing enough when you see these updates? And not in a good way but in a negative way?

Once I was following this guru. At first, it was interesting, seeing his updates. But after a short period of time, it started feeling “off.” I realized that he was constantly talking about his achievements, and not in a once-in-a-while way. It’s fine to talk about what you’re doing and what you’re achieving — it’s fine to share that.

But his updates felt sort of like he was… bragging? It was constantly namedropping and talking about how he’s really awesome for having achieved certain things above and beyond other people. After a while of seeing that, it started to become toxic. Because he created this feeling like I wasn’t doing enough, or maybe I wasn’t doing enough to build my business.

So instead of it being a positive experience, it became a toxic and negative one where seeing his updates made me feel like somehow I wasn’t good enough or that I wasn’t doing enough. I wasn’t sure if it was just me, so I asked two other people who knew this person and both of them got the same vibe too. The overall sense was an off-putting one. Looking at this person’s updates made me feel a great sense of FOMO.

After that, I stopped following this person because it was a negative experience all in all. I wasn’t getting any positive messages from it. For me, as someone who has a platform and shares messages with my audience, I have a certain standard in the kind of messages I send out and the intention of my messages, and I felt like this person’s updates wasn’t congruent with what I expect of my own platform.

Or it could be a totally different type of message. For example, you could be following people who promote a materialistic lifestyle or a way of life that is not very healthy or not in line with your values. If so, you want to limit your exposure to these people. Maybe they are constantly getting you to buy things, buy material goods. Or showing off branded stuff or insinuating that somehow having certain branded goods or possessing certain physical possessions validate yourself or a certain part of who you are… which wouldn’t be a message that you want to carry.

When you are exposed to and following these people, this would keep creating the FOMO feeling. This fear that you’re missing out. That you are not buying this thing (but you should). That you’re not being good enough. That you’re not living it up. That would naturally perpetuate the feeling of FOMO in you.

Another example: with the people you follow, maybe they present a very skewed version of reality. Maybe they constantly photoshop images or present a very cherry-picked aspect of life. And this cherry-picked aspect is a little bit twisted and not accurate to reality. So you’re no longer learning or seeing an authentic side of the world and people’s lives, but a very manufactured version of reality. This will naturally skew your perception of the world.

When you are following people and their updates, know that these are things that you are allowing to enter your consciousness. Ask yourself: Are these the kind of people you want in your living room, with you? Are these the people you want right beside you, in your daily life? If no, why do you want to see these updates on such a regular basis?

So be conscious of who you follow, the updates you see. If people’s updates keep making you feel negative, fear-based, that somehow you’re not good enough, that you’re missing out, that you should be doing/buying/getting that thing, take a step back and ask yourself: Are these the kind of people you want to follow?

Maybe’s it’s good to unfollow them. Limit your exposure to these people. Instead, follow people and content that inspire you to improve, as opposed to making you fearful or feel that you have a lack, because that is not true at all.

5) Consume information in a targeted way

My fifth and last tip is to consume information in a targeted way. The Internet today is characterized by an explosion of information. We have all kinds of information around us now. You want to be conscious of how you consume this information.

You want to receive and focus on content that’s tailored to you, that helps you in your life. For example, some of you may be in Facebook groups. When you join a Facebook group, Facebook automatically makes you follow that group, that group’s updates, and automatically adds you to the group’s notifications.

The way I do it is whenever I join a group, I will immediately unfollow the group’s updates and remove the group’s notifications. So I’m still in the group, but I just don’t see its updates by the second. Instead, I go into the group whenever I want to look at what it is up to. Why do I do that? This helps me to be conscious of the kind of updates I see when I enter Facebook’s main page. So firstly, I limit my usage of Facebook. Next, when I enter Facebook, I want to be conscious of the kind of updates I see on the front page. Facebook has its own algorithm and it cherry picks and selects whichever updates fit that algorithm. Typically these are updates focused on increasing and maximizing engagement, and that’s not necessarily what I want. Sometimes I want to see everything that the group has so far, discussions, etc. so that I can zoom in on the ones that are relevant to me. As opposed to having an algorithm that pre-selects and pre-filters, and the pre-filtered material may not be what I’m looking for.

So being conscious in terms of how you consume information. You pick and choose the sites that you want to see, the updates you want to see, the groups that you want to focus on for today or for a week. That’s the same for websites you follow, newsletters, YouTube channels that you subscribe to. You don’t need to be following everything. You don’t need to be subscribed to everything. You want to ask yourself: Which are the [sites/channels/etc.] that give you great value? Where you genuinely feel uplifted by the content? And the content helps you to live a better life, live a conscious life?

These are the channels/websites/newsletters that you want to stay subscribed to. Don’t worry about missing out because there’s just so much information out there. Your role today is to pick what works for you. Tuning into the information, the updates, the activities that are relevant to you. Rather than feeling that you need to be in the loop of everything. I feel the websites today — how conglomerates have designed their websites — are created to elicit that feeling that you’re not seeing enough, that there’s more content you need to see.

Because of that, we need to learn to draw our boundaries. Deciding that, Okay today I just want to consume this ABC piece of content. And that’s because this channel is something that I like, this website is a high-quality one. Hence I consciously choose to read and follow these things. Beyond that, I’m doing other stuff.

Closing Note

So that’s it for today’s episode. I have a few articles that are relevant to today’s episode that I’ll be linking to them in the show notes.

If you have found today’s podcast helpful, I would really appreciate it if you can leave a review on iTunes, and that’s at personalexcellence.co/itunes/. Doing so really makes a difference. It helps to spread the message of conscious living out there to the world. And I feel that is something that we massively need today.

If you are interested in living a better life in just 30 days, check out my 30-day life transformation program, Live a Better Life in 30 Days. I’ve packed my 30 best tasks on life transformation and that includes some of my best exercises that I share with my life coaching clients, to help them discover your life direction, discover their life goals, review how you are doing in your life, evaluate your routine, transform your to-do list, expand your comfort zone, discover their values, and many more. So you can check that out at personalexcellence.co/courses/30dlbl/.

Thank you so much for listening. I truly appreciate you. If you have a question for me, you can post it to me via the podcast page on personalexcellence.co. Until next time, remember: you are beautiful and you are perfect the way you are. Thanks so much guys. And I see you guys in the next episode. Bye guys!

Endnote: Thanks for listening to The Personal Excellence Podcast! For more tips on how to live your best life, visit www.personalexcellence.co

Related Resources:

• How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind
• 6 Tips to Deal with Digital Burnout
• Our Unique Path in Life [Podcast]
• Put First Things First
• Stop Looking For a Magic Bullet For Your Goals

(Click image for larger version)

Here are the different stages of this journey:

1. “This is the best idea ever!!” — When you just come up with a new goal
2. “This will be fun” — Getting started…
3. “This is harder than I thought” — Taking the first few steps
4. “This is going to be a lot of work” — Getting into the thick of things…
5. “This sucks I have no idea what I’m doing” — When you realize that this is harder than you thought
6. “#%@}!!!!!!!!!!!” — When you’ve invested way too much time and energy into this, but things aren’t turning out the way you want
7. “Ok but it still sucks” — When you see some results, but there’s still much to be done
8. “Quick, let’s call it a day and say we learned something” — When you feel like giving up
9. “Hmm…”
10. “Hey!”
11. “Wow” — #9 to #11: The Creation Process™
12. “This is one of the things I am most proud of” — Reaching the finishing line!

Having completed several book projects before, I can relate to this.

The contrast between Stages #1 and #5 is normal as many people severely underestimate the work needed for a goal. It’s only when we start working on it that we realize it’s not as easy as it seems.

Stage #6 is what I call development hell. This is when you are deep in the goal and experiencing all the difficulties and challenges. You have to really push through to get past this stage. This is also when you decide if you really want this enough to continue.

There are mentions of “Belief/Persistence” and “Family+Humour,” which are important factors to get you through this journey. Having the belief and persistence to tackle the obstacles. Having the support of loved ones and being able to laugh when the going gets tough.

As you can see, most people start off optimistic about their goals, but experience self-doubt or even think about giving up when they face one hurdle after another. I have gone through this before, especially in book writing.

If you’re working on a goal (such as an app, a book, or a business) and facing a roadblock, know that you’re not alone. Here are my tips to push through:

1. Understand that the effort to create anything great is often 100-1000X of what people think. The difficulty you’re facing is not specific to you but something everyone faces. The people who can get past the dark swamp are those who reach the other end.
2. Create a plan to address the obstacles. What’s blocking you now? How can you address it? Can you get help? Can you join a peer group or consult someone?
3. Break your goal down into milestones. Then, break each milestone into little steps. Focus on just one step at a time.
4. Get support. Is there anyone you can consult or connect with? If not, can you get emotional support, say from family and friends?
5. Take a few steps back. Things can seem disastrous when we are working on a goal, but that’s because we’re looking too closely and lacking a big picture. Go back to the drawing board. Ask yourself, Why am I working on this? Why is this important to me?
6. Don’t forget self-care. This goes out of the window when we’re working on a goal, but you need to rest and care for yourself to get anywhere far.

If something doesn’t seem to be working, review and change your approach. Be okay to change your goal if it’s not working for you; there’s nothing wrong with that.

Hang in there, we’re all in this together!

Read:

• 6 Tips To Get Through Development Hell
• How To Overcome Writer’s Block [Podcast]
• The Power of Little Changes

Note: I didn’t create this infographic and couldn’t find the source, so if you know the original creator, let me know.

Hi everyone! Last month I deleted my Facebook page with 20,800+ likes. To be precise, I deactivated it, but the page is as good as gone now. In this post I share why.

My Problem with Facebook

The truth is that Facebook hasn’t been adding value to me as a business owner. While I had previously deleted my Facebook account in 2011, it was because I was using the Facebook personal account which was the wrong tool for my business. I then switched to a Facebook page which resolved the issues I was having, such as creating segregation between my work and social life and going past the 5,000 friends limit.

But in the past years, I feel that Facebook has changed from being a potentially great platform for good content and discussion, to now a negative seeding ground, a place that promotes very low-level content, and even a seeding ground for fake news, a recent hot topic due to the 2016 US presidential elections.

Why has this happened? As a page owner, my biggest gripe is that the Facebook algorithm has degenerated over time to focus purely on engagement, sans quality. Engagement meaning likes, comments, and shares. When a post generates many likes/comments/shares in a short period of time, Facebook regards it as newsworthy and “pushes” the content out to more people.

On the other hand, if your post doesn’t get enough likes/comments/shares in a very short amount of time, its reach gets depressed. This is why if you have been a Facebook page owner since 2010, you would have seen the organic reach of your posts plummet from 100% to 1-2% over the past few years.^[1][2]

The Problem with Using Engagement as the Key Metric

What’s the problem with using engagement to assess a post’s quality?

The thing is that engagement is a good measure of a post’s value when everyone takes time to read/think through each post that appears in their newsfeed.

But nobody has time to do that today. We live in a fast-paced world today. People are constantly frustrated due to living pressures. Anger, fear, and envy dominate our society. We are constantly pressed for time. Distractions are everywhere and stimuli are constantly blasted in our faces.

As a result, many people use Facebook for a quick escape, not to think. Many people use Facebook when they are bored and don’t know what to do, which entices them to engage with very simple content such as memes and selfies, rather than long-form information.

As a result, the most highly-engaged content on Facebook these days is usually content that provides some distraction and escape, content that triggers uproar or indignation, and content that scratches an itch. NOT content that pushes you to think about the hard topics of life and your personal goals. NOT content that engages the higher faculties of your brain, such as research, long-form interviews, and innovative ideas.

This means that

• When a highly edited selfie and a blog post are put side-by-side, the selfie will generally win based on Facebook’s algorithm, because it doesn’t take much thought to process a selfie.
• When fake news with an absurd title and a real news story with a “boring” title are put side-by-side, the fake news will win. Because fake news is able to elicit quick reactions due to its absurd headline. Case in point: NY Times shared how a recent fake news article got 350,000 shares on Facebook in just one day. This fake article subsequently got reposted on Reddit and got the attention of real journalists. The corrected followup received barely any attention.^[3]
• When a short tips post with the same few repetitive tips and a long-form article with comprehensive and unique content are put side-by-side, the quick tips will win. Because short-form content is easier to process for the average Facebook user.

To add salt to the wound, Facebook intentionally limits the reach of content that links outside of its platform (like a blog post or a YouTube video), because it wants people to stay within its “walled garden.” This means high-quality external blog posts and videos are difficult to spread within the Facebook community. This creates an echo chamber, where Facebook users are just echoing and seeing the same few thoughts and ideas, rather than actually seeing new content and ideas from outside of its platform.

Not to mention, many Facebook users who engage with a post often do not read the post.^[4] Most users just “like” and comment based on the few words in the headline, based on their assumption of what it means. I have experienced this with my posts, where people criticized my content when they didn’t even read the post. This means the posts you see on your Facebook newsfeed are generally upvoted based on people’s knee-jerk reactions rather than their actual value.

Which leads to my main problem: I feel that my site direction and content are not compatible with Facebook’s anymore, at least not with the way their algorithm works today (as of 2016).

1. I have no interest to write posts just to get a rise out of people. Many reactions are noise, not an indicator of a content’s ability to create change.
2. I do not wish to deal with 2-3 second reactions to my writings.
3. I don’t care if people “like” or comment on my Facebook posts. I just want people to think about how my tips apply to their life, which may take days, sometimes weeks or months, not minutes to an hour. I also hope for people to pass my articles on to their friends/family if they found them useful.

But when Facebook heavily depresses a page’s reach unless it can gain engagement within an hour or so, and automatically depresses external content, it’s a huge problem for me. When your posts aren’t “engaging” a big pool of people quickly (based on likes/comments/shares), your next post will reach even fewer followers. To the point where you reach nobody.

To reach more people, including the very people who “liked” your page to get your updates, you need to pay to use Facebook’s “Boost” feature, a type of Facebook ad. But why? You have worked hard to earn these people’s “Likes,” and now you need to pay to show them posts that they signed up to see in the first place? That’s just a circular way to get you to keep paying Facebook and be trapped in your dependency on them!

And as Facebook’s algorithm keeps changing based on what generates the most profit (because Facebook’s goal as a publicly listed company is to maximize profits), the organic reach for good, externally-linked content will continue to decrease. Facebook just generated its highest earnings yet in the last quarter (Q3 of 2016)^[5], and this is in the face of growing user fatigue.^[6][7]

Evaluating Your Facebook Newsfeed

It’s the same when it comes to the content on your Facebook newsfeed. Most of the posts are there because they get people’s reactions the fastest (selfies, quick tips), trigger the most emotions within minutes (social injustices, outrageous news), and/or tickle people’s fancies (like cat videos). It’s not based on their real value.

Which means you need to ask yourself: Are you okay with constantly receiving content that’s upvoted and put in your newsfeed based on few-second reactions, or are you looking for something deeper when you use social media? Because in the former scenario, you will keep seeing noise, get a feeling of user fatigue, and have an unhealthy draw to the platform, because the updates you keep seeing do little to change your life. This is why you constantly return to Facebook more often than you should, in a quest to get something more, to fill some sort of gap.

As a Facebook page owner, I can’t help but feel like I’m in a merry-go-round, where I’m pushed to write content in a way that gets the most reactions, just to reach the very people who subscribed to my page to get updates in the first place.

This is not what I want. Rather than engage in noise matches, I rather focus on creating deeply thought-out content and serving my readers who want to read and implement my material. My goal of managing a platform isn’t to create stickiness, which focuses on making a user stay at a website beyond what is needed. My goal is to give them the information they need to think and act. IMO every Facebook page owner should focus on creating content that matters, not engage in like/comment matches to get more engagement and exposure, which usually means nothing as the average Facebook user flits through updates. Even if you do get a lot of engagement after much effort, it’s questionable whether your views are quality views and from the right people.

So I deleted my Facebook page. As the issue has been brewing for years, I guess this is a long time coming. The problem became so ridiculous that running my page had become more time-consuming and painful with little for me to gain as a business owner. There were other signs that contributed to this decision, such as ongoing spam, pointless analytics, and an increasingly cluttered admin layout designed to push you to buy Facebook ads. There were also pointless, endless notifications that prompt you to buy their ads and alerts that you can’t opt out of.

The fundamental issue is that I created my Facebook page to connect with you guys, but I can’t even do something as basic as this now without going through hoops and being blasted with noise. I would much rather build my relationship with you through my website and newsletter, where I know my emails will always be sent to you, where I know those of you who are really interested to follow my updates will be reading my emails, as opposed to being subjected by an algorithm that filters what I want to share with you.

How I Use Facebook as a Personal Account User

Now the issues I mentioned above are specific to a Facebook page for businesses/personalities. As a private Facebook user who deliberately has zero connected friends, I find Facebook quite useful. Their chat messenger is handy, especially after they finally released an option to disable push notifications permanently. Unsolicited messages go into a different tab so I never see them. I don’t have any friends connected so I’m free from filtered newsfeed content based on Facebook’s noise-driven algorithm. I only join groups that I want to be a part of and leave when they’re not a fit. I check people’s profiles directly to read updates if they are public. I message personal friends directly to see how they are doing, not rely on the newsfeed to get a faux connection.

Just to be clear, Facebook’s algorithm works well for certain content. Basically, content that elicits reactions or drives discussion, short tips, simple advice (even when it’s the same thing repeated over and over), short quotes, people’s stories, selfies, and posts that trigger uproar, criticism, shock, or emotion.

But beyond inspiring quotes and simplified advice, I think what the world needs now is deeply-thought-out material that tackles big questions and big issues; not oversimplified content or content that caters to the monkey mind. I have no wish to take part in noise matches but to be my path to serve and connect with you.

As to why I deactivated my Facebook page instead of deleting it, it’s because Facebook can always change. If it becomes a positive ground for sharing conscious discussions and deep content one day, then I’d be happy to rejoin as a page owner.

If you used to be on my Facebook page, do subscribe to my newsletter to get my updates, including messages and special announcements that I don’t post on the blog.

Some other posts where I wrote about today’s noise-filled world:

• Feeling Disconnected
• Busy vs. Productive: 7 Tips to be Productive, Not Busy
• Online Negativity: How To Create a Better Internet for Everyone
• How Social Media Creates a Fear of Missing Out (And What To Do About It) [Podcast]

Update – June 2018

As some of my readers get my blog updates via their Facebook newsfeed, and as Facebook does provide some form of connection and vague credibility for a business owner, I have reinstated my Facebook page. I do see some vague improvements in how Facebook works after the fake news saga (from the 2016 US presidential elections) and growing user complaints.

However, the problems that I mentioned above still exist (spam, noise, absurdly depressed organic reach, the inability for long-form content to travel well), and because of that I no longer invest my time into growing or maintaining my Facebook page. I leave my Facebook page online and use an automated service to feed my blog updates there, but otherwise, I don’t actively check, maintain, or put in an effort to improve my page anymore. Instead, I focus on building my blog, connecting with my users via my newsletter, and building my community in a way that I feel adds real value and impact to the world.

In the same vein, I just deleted my Twitter account which I share more here: Why I Deleted My Twitter Account With 7,000 Followers

(Click image for larger version (Infographic by Business Insider))

My favorite ones are saying no (#11), helping others (#9), stretching and moving around (#5), and being grateful (#16).

Just saying no has helped me regain hundreds of hours that I’ve been able to devote to my Q2 activities.

Helping others energizes me — even when I’m very busy, I try to find a time pocket to do a kind deed for someone, including giving a simple email reply with advice — and that perks me up after that.

Stretching is super important — given that my work is all digital, I take frequent breaks and walk around as much as I can during my non-work hours.

And gratitude allows me to constantly remember how lucky I am to have what I have and appreciate the good things in life. 

What do you do at the start of your workday? :) Any tips above that you can incorporate in your own workday? Check out my resources on creating your best routine:

• Is Your Routine Empowering You?
• Do You Have a Morning Ritual?
• Live a Better Life in 30 Days, Day 9: Evaluate Your Routines