It’s been about five months since I last wrote about Alex Fayle, the “Someday Syndrome” guy. For those who don’t know him, he specializes in helping people uncover hidden patterns so they can break their procrastination habit and start living the life they desire.

He’s taken his previous ebook off the market to update and expand it. But he’s also just released his new one: I’ll Get Around To It Someday: A Practical Guide To Getting Things Done.

In this new ebook, he gives us more insight into how to end the procrastination that makes us put our somedays off to, well, “someday.” When you learn how to kill the disinterest, inertia, and fear at the roots of procrastination, you can start making serious progress on what’s important to you.

If you ever find day after day going by, without taking steps towards your dreams, definitely check it out.

You may have heard of blogger and life coach Alex Fayle, also known as the “Someday Syndrome” guy. Someday Syndrome is the affliction that people suffer from when they know their life isn’t what they want, and they stare off into space thinking “someday my ship will come in.”

What Alex does is help people uncover hidden patterns so they can break their procrastination habit and start living the life they desire. He’s certainly done that in his own life, overcoming his procrastination to move to Spain and follow his dreams such as becoming a fiction author. In his new ebook Someday My Ship Will Come In: A Practical Guide to Finding Your Dreams, he shows you how to do the same.

I had a chance to read a draft of this ebook. When Alex asked me specifically what I thought it would do for people, I said the lessons and exercises would help them get clear about their dreams now versus never thinking about them and leaving them to chance. Because the biggest reason that people fail to achieve their dreams isn’t so much that they try and fail, but they put them off to a “someday” that never arrives.

Whatever your dreams are, you can’t just wait for them to come to you. You have to identify them, focus on them, take the first few steps, and get the ball rolling. That’s what it takes to cure your Someday Syndrome. Let Alex show you how in Someday My Ship Will Come In.

Photo by sunrise100(deuce)

Shaun Boyd at LifeReboot.com has written about how he recently accepted that nothing he writes will ever be perfect. Falling into the common trap of obsessing over perfection, he scrapped a lot of posts that were probably excellent because he found something wrong with each one. Then he received this comment from a reader:

“well, after almost a month with no new posts, i’m forced to unsubscribe. it’s a shame – this blog had a lot of potential.”

Shaun acknowledged the comment, then responded by writing a post the next day, and another one four days later (which was yesterday). He says he’s given up on perfection.

I can’t say that I’ve kicked the perfectionist habit that cleanly, but I do make an effort to relax my inner editor to increase my output. I think of it as “doing it right vs. doing it right now.”

This is not specific to blogging, but it’s very common with any kind of writing. I notice it when I’m writing software programs, which is somewhat understandable, but I even do it with very simple emails. I always feel the urge to check the spelling one more time, make sure everything flows, that all the bases are covered, and that everything sounds right.

In a way, this is good. After all, if you look around it’s not hard to find plenty of cases where work has been done very sloppily. Paying attention to detail is a good thing.

But one of the problems with too much of a good thing is diminishing returns. When you write your first draft, it might be 85% perfect right off the bat. A small amount of effort is all that’s needed to get it to 95%. If you check it very carefully and pay a lot of attention to how it will sound to readers, you can eventually get it to 99%. But a perfectionist will spend exponentially more time getting it to 99.1%, then 99.101%, etc.

By spending all that time trying to make an already good thing marginally better, you’re depriving yourself of the chance to make many more good things. Which would you rather have: one post that’s 99.44% perfect, or five posts that are 95% perfect? And here’s the kicker: the world probably won’t appreciate your perfectionism. Show someone a 95% post against your 99.44% pure masterpiece, and they might not be able to tell which is which. They might even prefer the other one.

While this principle is commonly observed in writing, it can be seen everywhere. Anytime someone says it’s not a good time to have kids (year after year after year), or they’re not good enough to start competing in some sport or hobby (year after year after year), or they don’t have enough information to try a business idea they’ve been thinking about (year after year after year), they’re stuck in the trap of waiting for the time to be right. Guess what—the time will never be right, so you can’t let that paralyze you.

I’m not saying to be careless. I’m saying to be aware of the trade-offs and strike a balance between “right” and “right now.” People tend to err heavily on the side of doing things “right,” and then realize far too late that they haven’t done very many things. Relaxing your standards a bit can help you crank up the output and get far more done for the same effort.

On another note, can someone explain to me why a low posting frequency would force someone to unsubscribe?