Report

I couldn’t finish the project report today. I had a meeting with Girish in the morning and we decided to try submit the report by the evening. Again, didn’t happen. Then we finally decided to submit it tomorrow.

I am a snail

I have always felt that I do things slowly. The work that I get done almost never justifies the hours passed. I feel that perfectionism plays a role in that. I care too much about the small details. It always happens, no matter what.

I am writing so let’s talk about the writing process I go through every day. While writing I re-read a lot. I write a paragraph and then read it to make sure that things like structure, flow, grammar, etc. make sense. I re-read every line and every paragraph I write. Once I finish writing, I test the website on a local server and check for the errors. Even though I would have read the post about 10 times until that point, I still find some errors. I correct those errors and again check if there’s anything left. I update the site if I don’t find any errors. Then I go to the live site again to see if the flow, structure, etc. make sense. I still find some errors at this point, even though I have read the text so many times. I edit the post again and update the site. You can guess what happens next. I again read the post to check for errors.

I take so long to write even a small post. I could cut the total time taken by a lot if I care a bit less about the technalities of writing, but I just can’t do that. This happens with everything I do. I choose to pay attention to very small details and that eats up all the time.

I am experiencing the same problem while writing the report. I just can’t leave any sentence poorly structured and move on. I keep rewriting the sentences and even paragraphs to make them better. At noon, Girish had asked me to finish the editing by 4 pm. I started editing and by 4 pm I had edited only 4 pages. I just couldn’t see where all that time went. I didn’t do much but 4 hours had passed.

I am a snail.

I should mention that I don’t feel proud or anything in being sort of a perfectionist. Infact I hate it. It affects everything I do. It affects the people I work with. It doesn’t let me relax.

To speed up the writing part (and to learn from what I am writing about), I am going to re-read this post just once. At the end, in the local server.

Time taken by this post spent on this post

  • Writing: ~ 20 minutes
  • Editing: ~ 20 30 minutes

I can’t believe I have spent 40 50 minutes. I am sure that there are still a lot of grammatical errors lurking in the text. It’s unsettling for me but I am going to leave it here. 40 minutes is just too much for this kind of a post.

UPDATE: The strikethrough text was edited immediately after publishing the post. Why can’t I see these things in one go?