I view trading as a business. In that regard, I've found a weak point in my personality: I'm a perfectionist and tend to drill down into minute details. This is a problem because a business demands attention to the big picture and learning to prioritize what's important. Have any of you encountered this, and what've you done to fix it? It isn't enough to just list things like in the book "Getting Things Done" -- I find that each list item recurses into an infinite set of tasks which prevents me from getting stuff done, other than one narrow thing. I'm just asking for minor tips and tricks to kind of shock yourself back into seeing the big picture.
1) "Good enough", is usually good enough. 2) Things do not have to be done "perfectly" the first time. There's always time to do it over. 3) Nobody probably really cares how "perfect" you believe you are. 4) Focus on "doing" things instead of pissing around with lists. 5) You learn more from imperfections, not perfection. 6) Intuitively, you seem to be realizing that perfectionism is a silly choice on your part.
You're not a perfectionist. A true perfectionist wants EVERYTHING their way. A lot of people would consider you a FOCUSED person. 2 different things.
What I wrote is "tasteful" for an individual. Compromise is for people who let others get "the better" of them.
You probably wouldn't follow suggestions anyway. But, I suggest you make a loose schedule. Your trading time. Your email/phone call time. Your research time. Your read a book/newspaper/magazine (web OR paper based) time. Your tv time. Your family time. Your go out and buy needed items time. Whatever. So for example, "To Do's" get done between time x and y (like 4-4:45pm). If not done in that window, it waits until tomorrow. Do the same thing for each band of time, During the first 2 minutes of this period, start doing the most critical and pressing items on your list.
The big picture is at the end of the Interstate. Everthing else is a series of on and off ramps. Do I need to exit and for how long?
I like the goal pyramid. It sets no time limits on anything. Draw a triangle, divide in three parts top to bottom. At the top put your ultimate goals, middle contains the intermediate goals you need to attain to get on towards the top and the bottom is the list of things you need to get done... the bottom is your do-list... eventually you can refer to the pyramid infrequently meanwhile keeping after that do-list as diligently as you can.. I still have my original pyramid I drew fifteen years ago.. Here is a saying for you, I forget who originated it.. "doing things well is efficiency. Doing the right things is effectiveness". Try to balance efficiency with effectiveness and you might be at a good place...
you need to have discipline, and the best definition i've found for discipline is: the act of never losing sight of your purpose. couple things, a daily/weekly reminder of your overall project goal and how it relates to your overall business goal is very helpful. starting the day asking yourself what you're going to do today and how it relates to the above. setting milestones and asking yourself the question, is this tangent necessary to reaching this milestone? if not, x it, or limit it. being super rigid though can take a lot of the fun out of running your own business, so the best way i've found to deal with the day to day is allowing yourself to drill down, but only x number of of hours a day (for me i like to limit it to an hour or two). because most of the time for me 'drilling down on something' or 'perfectionism' is a euphism for 'escape'. the enormity of the trading business can sometimes be daunting and it's easy to 'legitimately' sidetrack yourself. stay focused and good luck...