How to become a completionist from a perfectionist by learning from “Hyperactivity” (written by Takafumi Horie)

The important thing is to finish it

Applying the famous 80/20 rule, if it takes 100 points of effort to complete a 100 point task, it will take 20 points of effort to complete an 80 point task.

“Hyperactivity” recommends taking advantage of the power of combination by working on many things at the same time, so if you use the same 100 effort, it would be more effective to complete five 80-point tasks to make a 400-point task than to do only one 100-point task.

Image of effort and score of perfectionism and completionism

	effort	score
perfectionism	100	100
Completionism	20	80

If you divide the same 100 effort into 5 parts, the total score will be 400 points!

	effort	score
Completionism	20	80
	20	80
	20	80
	20	80
	20	80
total	100	400

This is just an image, but if you do 80 points of work with 20 efforts, you can get such a big result.

However, the important thing is to “finish/complete” the task with a score of 80.There is a big difference between not completing the work with 80 points and completing it with 80 points.
Although there are not many places in this book that directly explain how to complete the process, you can see many ideas and concrete examples that lead to it in each chapter.

People who suffer from the negative effects of being a perfectionist should think about how to learn how to efficiently complete work with a score of 80, considering their own situation.things will be an issue.

What should you do in a field where you absolutely have to get 100 points or 100%?

Although 80 points is fine for some jobs, there are some fields, such as finance and medicine, where 100 points or 100% are required depending on the job.Is it not possible to apply the 80-point completion principle to such fields?

Here are two methods to help you solve this problem.

1. Arrange your pace so that you can give your best when you need 100 points.

This was also written in “Hyperdynamics”.Humans are not designed to be able to run at full speed all the time.This is true even in fields that require a high level of accuracy, such as finance and medicine, and since there are people involved who cannot consistently score 100 points, 80 points should be sufficient in most areas.

If you say this, you may be tempted to argue, “My work always has to be 100 points,” but please keep in mind that part of your ability is being able to cut corners and adjust your pace so that you can get 100 points where you really need 100 points.

For example, in “Hyperactivity”, it is introduced that families do not have to do everything themselves, such as making their children’s lunches with frozen food or outsourcing housework.

2. Image of repeating a task to be completed with 80 points

Instead of getting 100 points all at once, you can aim for 100 points by repeating the 80 point work as many times as you like.

If you do a job worth 80/100 points, the missing points are 20 points.
If you do 80 points for this 20 points and 80% of the work again, it will increase to 94 points.
If you repeat 80 points, you will get 99.2 points.Next is 99.84 points.The next one is 99.968 points.
This means that by repeating a task worth 80 points five times, you can produce a product worth 99.968 points.For most jobs, if the quality is this high, there shouldn’t be any problems.

number of times	Remaining points	score
0	100	0
1	20	80
2	4	96
3	0.8	99.2
4	0.16	99.84
5	0.032	99.968

The physical and mental exhaustion of doing work that requires 100 points is extremely high.
Even if you can do a 100% perfect job, it will be difficult to do a 100 point job again unless you take some time to recover.

However, the consumption of 80 points is often much less than that of 100 points.
Therefore, in many cases, it is more efficient to get closer to 100% by repeating easy 80 points several times, rather than putting a lot of effort into getting 100% all at once.

This way of thinking can be said to be an easy method to use in fields with strong creative elements, such as in the software field where it is common for some errors to occur, and in writing where it is natural for the first draft to contain typos and omissions.

Many of our customers who use task management partners wish to complete many things at the same time, but it is impossible to do all of them with 100 points, so we check tasks with emphasis on how efficiently we can accumulate 80 points of completion.
If you are aiming for a job where you can accumulate a large number of 80-point completions and still get 100 points in important areas, please consider using it.