Well, my perfectionism was not in vain, because I won the contest!  Yay!  You can check out my lens here.

Why tabby cats?

Well, a Squidoo community that I’m a part of has been having weekly contests, and last week’s was to write a lens for the “animals and nature” category.  I figured this would be good for me; all of my lenses to date have been [...]]]> This weekend I wrote a Squidoo lens about tabby cats.

Why tabby cats?

Well, a Squidoo community that I’m a part of has been having weekly contests, and last week’s was to write a lens for the “animals and nature” category.  I figured this would be good for me; all of my lenses to date have been about my various cognitive issues, and some of them have been pretty heavy.  I chose “tabby cats” as my topic for two reasons: one, I have two tabby cats; and number two, I am such a nerd that I have actually phenotyped my cats.

That’s right, I was reading about cat genetics several years ago on the internet, and armed with the information I found about dominant and recessive alleles, I figured out which genes both of my cats express.  I did this for fun.

Anyway, I figured that I’d be able to write this lens in my sleep.  But then I decided that I wanted to illustrate the lens with photos of my actual cats.  So I had to take pictures of them, and then download them, and then crop them, and then upload them, and then write blurbs about what they illustrated …

And in short, the lens took me twenty #%*@ing hours.  Gah.  Actually, a lot of my lenses, and my blog entries, and anything else I write, tends to take me way longer than I feel it should.  You may have noticed that I can’t write a blog entry without writing an essay.

I know I’d be more productive if I could let it go sometimes.  One of my MFA profs liked to tell a story about a pottery class in which half the students were told that they’d be graded on the quality of one perfect pot, so they spent the entire term on that one pot.  The other half of the class was told they’d be graded on the number of pots they produced; the quality of the pieces didn’t matter.  Those students spent the term madly making pots, as many as they could.

Guess which group produced the best ceramics?

If you know anything about the creative process, you won’t be surprised to learn that it was the second group.  They felt free to experiment and make mistakes, because the only thing that mattered was that they made as many pots as they could.  They felt free, and it showed in their work.

What does this have to do with ADD and organization?  Well, I’ve been reading a lot about time management lately, and it turns out that perfectionism is a common ADD trait. It’s also a huge drain on productivity.  It certainly tell you that it messes with my life.  I don’t update my blogs as often as I would like, because I feel like I have to say something profound, and I feel obligated to add graphics (that takes quite a bit of time, actually).

So I am hereby resolving to write my blog posts without worrying how “good” they are.  It’s a blog, dammit, not a New Yorker article or a PhD thesis.  Some posts will be extensive and detailed.  Others, well, they’ll just be blog posts.