My father might have already picked out at lest a few flaws in this blog piece already. And one of them would probably be that the sentences are too long. I tried telling him that, I have seen writers being far more legible and eloquent with even longer sentences! But that’s ot the point. The point is how years of working as an administrator has shaped him out to prefer conciseness, brevity and functionality over style and beauty.

Beauty and perfection are interlinked both ways. Whatever field it may be, our creative efforts should appear beautiful. At least to us. But, how to make things beautiful AND make them fast! How to satisfy this capitalist dogma! How to balance the trade off between perfection and speed? In making things perfect, efficiency (i.e., the speed of the process) might be hampered, and vice versa. And this is a real problem! By real I mean, it is one of those things that will deeply impact one’s work, one’s life and one’s relationships.

One could potentially also just be sluggish; feigning perfection and not really make any useful progress. So, perfection is not a guaranteed outcome. It is subjective. One can suffer from imposter syndrome regarding perfection. On the flip side, speed, being an objective matter, is always guaranteed. If you’re fast, you’re fast. You can measure the time, and clock yourself. But, maybe one could be fastest if one went ahead with whatever their minds spewed out, without making any effort to take it to a minimum quality. What I am trying to say is that, obviously, the fastest course of action might be to produce a “garbage(!)”. That might take the least possible time. But, for the efficiency to be valid a minimum threshold of quality should be crossed. You can always choose to go rogue and have no standards whatsoever, if you like!

So, I have had a few takeaways, while writing this piece. By “while writing” I mean, as I am typing the words. As I am editing them. Not, revisiting them afterwards, once they have been published.

  1. Writing is slightly therapeutic.
  2. If you have struggled with time management, you might have two course of action.
    • If you have a good track record of quality you can afford to take your quality down a notch, to meet time constraints. Chances are, you can still have an worthy result above that threshold.
    • If you are not only slow, but lack quality as well, like me, just go rogue and do whatever you like. Do you have anything to lose? No seriously, what do you have to lose?

I guess in the back of my mind, I had this idea. The idea that perhaps engaging in small “productive” or “creative” efforts, such as setting up this writing blog, will help me figure out that so elusive balance between perfection and efficiency. Consistent “passive consumption” has its tolls. Consumption centric recreational activities like scrolling social media, watching movies or eating out make activities requiring “active effort”, harder than they should be. Engaging in creative tasks and pursuits feel difficult, because the easier thing to do would be engage in some sort of passive consumption.

So I figured, that I might start with a task, that came naturally, effortlessly and had a slightly lower entry barrier for me. I never imagined that I would consider “writing” to be that task. Oh the irony! I wrote all that you have read above on a whim, and will continue to do so. However, it took me approximately an hour to write this up. I still think it’s too slow and quite frankly, violates the very takeaways that I mentioned previously. I rechecked, and spent a long time proofreading. But, I’ll stop here.

I just want to keep this portion of my creative pursuit whimsical, and free from all sorts of arbitrary standards. I cannot emphasize how much, such standards of comparison has kept me from just starting things, let alone finishing them. No mater how small, I want to BEGIN!

I can vaguely remember a piece by “Promoth Chowdhury” from my SSC syllabus - that essentially portrayed how creative tasks should be strictly for self-satisfaction.

Weird how, something learned that long ago, would make sense now!