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So here’s a grand, wonderful irony: I started writing this newsletter in early June.

I’d come back to my meager Google Doc every few days, reworking the same few sentences, each time thinking I was finally ready to finish. But I never really made any progress — I wanted it to be just right, and I fell into an editing and re-editing spiral. But, of course, just right is a mirage that never materializes, and that mirage prevented me from … actually finishing this newsletter.

Is the prose here any better for all of that incremental faux-progress? Probably not! I wanted it to be, but I know that if I had just gotten it done when I wanted to, instead of examining every word with a microscope, I could’ve saved myself a lot of unnecessary stress (and actually hit my self-imposed deadline). And that needless obsession with perfection is kind of the whole deal: By agonizing over tiny improvements in our work — if they even are improvements — we prevent ourselves from achieving the actual goal of, you know, doing the work.

“At some point, we must remind ourselves, any changes we make to a creation no longer make it better but just different (and sometimes worse),” Dr. Alex Lickerman wrote in Psychology Today on the topic of just getting things done. “Recognizing that inflection point — the point at which our continuing to rework our work reaches a law of diminishing returns — is one of the hardest skills to learn, but also one of the most necessary.”