The time waster, the dilettante, the calm one, the lukewarm one: Nils Spitzer outlines counter concepts to perfectionists in his book Overcoming Perfectionism.
And recommends exercises to learn from them.
Exercise with wasting time:
Stroll and dawdle
Intentionally disregard a specified duration, for example of distances, and procrastinate and slow your pace. Pretend to look around sluggishly, bend down and untie your shoe to tie another loop, perhaps borrow an assistant from the elderly neighbor or something similar to make your new slowness visible to others legitimize. Or slowly pack away the things you bought at the supermarket checkout.
Exercise in hilarious tinkering:
Follow your own fleeting interests
What are you really in the mood for right now? What is particularly positive about amateurism is that it is non-specialized and therefore spontaneous. It follows desire rather than ability and does not take disciplinary boundaries so seriously. To do this exercise, try following your own wavering interest for a day – but as soon as effort in one thing begins to outweigh interest, stop and move on to the next things that attract you.
Exercise in serenity:
Consider giving up
Instead of thinking in the morning about which goals you want to pursue today and in what way, think briefly about what you can leave behind. Simply skip the party in the evening, stop preparing this project, simply cancel the planned weekend vacation or a conference. Allow yourself to be vaguely touched by thoughts that maybe this isn’t all that important.
Exercise to be in lukewarm:
Be satisfied
Always looking for the best – the coolest shirt, the best-paying job, the most representative old apartment. This search for the optimum is often not the only possible strategy. The lukewarm person knows: only being satisfied while foregoing the optimal solution represents a behavior that is appropriate to the limits of life.
With this exercise, try to make smaller decisions in everyday life in the mode of being satisfied – only look at a few offers and decide based on only a few criteria, even if your ambition requires you to know all the offers and calculate all the criteria .