Perfection Is Killing Your Progress: How to Get More Done Without Burning Out, Episode 5

Are you spending hours polishing content that no one will read - or worse, never publishing at all?

In this episode, Brian Ostrovsky (creator of Marketing 3-4-5™ and founder of Locable) tackles the hidden cost of perfectionism for local leaders, businesses, and community organizations. If you’re constantly overwhelmed, this mindset shift might be exactly what you need.

This episode covers:

• How perfectionism leads to burnout and inaction
• Why digital content doesn’t need to be flawless
• When “good enough” is actually great
• Why it’s easier to edit something than to create from scratch
• How to budget your time instead of letting tasks consume it
• What Dan Martell’s “80% awesome” principle means for your marketing
• How to start getting results fast with less stress

Whether you’re running a Main Street, Chamber, DMO, nonprofit, or small business, this episode gives you permission to stop obsessing—and start doing.

💡 Pro tip: You can’t get more time, but you can reclaim the time you’re wasting on things that don’t really matter.

Learn more about Locable and see how your community can become a Locable community.

Join our #TakeBackLocal community of local-doers here >>

Transcript

The Trap of Perfectionism

Print vs Digital: Fix It Later

Burnout from Chasing Tiny Details

Make It Fast: Tools and Time

80% Done Is Awesome

Publish, Edit, Repeat

Budget Time, Not Just Money

Be Intentional and Ship Work

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to marketing from the car. This is Brian Ostrovsky here with you. And today I want to talk a little bit about the uh dangers of perfectionism and some suggestions I have for you to overcome it, to move past it being paralyzing and uh and really get some value right now. So we deal with a lot of perfectionists on the uh media side. We work with a lot of uh magazine and newspaper folks, uh, and then we work with a lot of people on the mainstream chamber side and DMO side who are really perfectionists, which means like I gotta do it myself. I need total control, I need all these things. At the same time, there's this interesting contrast, right? If you go to print, for instance, uh you can't fix it afterwards, but digital is totally editable. And uh, I tell this story a lot that I'll do blog posts and my mom will read it and provide feedback, and often say I used a comma wrong or a misparenthes or whatever, and I'll edit it and I'll text her and say, Oh, I don't even know what you're talking about because it's now fixed. And it's kind of an inside joke, but it lends itself to the fact that it's better to publish something than to wait for it to be perfect. And obviously there are exceptions, but by and large, perfectionism means you have to do it yourself and you have to spend a lot of time on it, and there is a significant amount of diminishing returns, and you have other things, right? It's not like this isn't a vacuum, you have other responsibilities, and so uh we see a lot of burnout, a ridiculous amount. It is a season of burnout, and uh it's a shame because these people really believe in the mission and they do good work, but they spend so much time doing the piddly shit, the stuff that just doesn't need to be optimized. And you know, Canva, I talk about Canva a lot, really cool tool. And but now people are getting in and you know creating all these graphics, and some are cool, but some of it doesn't really matter, you know, it doesn't have to be the prettiest thing, or or people will spend hours or days a week on their email newsletters, it should be fast. I mean, even with the existing tools you use, it should be maybe 30 to 45 minutes on local, it should be like five minutes, but um, it should be fast if you're spending in that much time. You have to ask yourself, what am I not doing? What am I not saying yes to because I'm saying yes to this? And uh in his book Buy Back Your Time, Dan Martell says, you know, 80 done by someone else is a hundred percent freaking awesome. And while all of you have people who could help take the load off, whether it's a volunteer, an intern, a board member, a staff member, there's also this idea that let technology do its thing. So, what I want to encourage you as we're sort of encapsulating a lot of stuff here, don't let perfection be the enemy of progress. I talk a lot about sharing these examples from your business, and you're like, Oh, I'm not a great writer. What if there's a typo? What if there is a typo? So what? Keep going, edit it when you see it. What if you forget something? Edit it, add it, share it again. You know, everything's an opportunity, everything's marketing, everything is a chance to renew uh what you're doing, and so um don't miss out on those opportunities. Not only that, it's way easier, infinitely easier to edit something than it is to create it. So just get creating, word vomit, do an outline, do the thing, use one of our worksheets. You have so many things that people should know about you that they don't because you don't give them the opportunity to. So I really want to be both an encouragement and give you permission if it's not worth it, don't spend the time on it. If it takes a lot of time, if it burns you out, if it doesn't spark joy to hearken back to the organization thing, um don't don't get too caught up about it. And you know, there's this other idea of budgeting. Um you know what I think most people believe in at least the idea of budgeting their money, not that many of us do it very well, uh, but this idea that you are trying to be intentional, don't want to go outside your means. But we don't budget our time. And interestingly, you can get more money, but you can't get more time. And so instead of thinking about, okay, how much time will this take me, you can think about how much time am I willing to put into it and know that when you get to the end, that's it. What if you have to do less? Then do less. What if it won't look as good? Then don't have a look as good. Because at the beginning, if you weren't willing to put a hundred hours into the thing, don't put a hundred hours into the thing. So, you know, there's a lot of different techniques. We're going to be talking about a lot more in the future, uh, to manage time and manage expectations and manage other people's expectations of your time. But um, this idea of perfectionism keeps so many good organizations and communities from being being successful. A lot of businesses fail because they're perfectionists. Everything has to be just so. They're so busy doing nothing that they don't ever do the thing that needs to get done. So, you know, obviously there's a time that you want to make sure that it's perfect. If you're going to print, you know, avoid the typos and so forth. But aside from that, it probably could be edited. So get it out there, get feedback, learn, get smarter based on what people actually care about, and then decide do I want to spend more time? But be intentional, don't just go down the rabbit hole and not know where to stop. When you stop being perfectionists, you get to spend time on things that matter to you, then that matter to your community, which is at the crux of helping you and your community take back local.