A pediatrician once told me, "Creativity is a product of boundaries." By self-imposing a deadline, you created a new set of boundaries to bring the challenge into crisper focus.

I particularly liked your statement, "Perfection is the enemy of progress." A few years ago, I was in a meeting with a project management firm here in Colorado. The discussion had gotten bogged down and the CEO finally said, "We tell our clients, 'Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good.'" Instead of striving for perfection, he encouraged his team to pick a "good enough" solution for the particular task and move on.

Both individuals and companies can lose sight of the economic value (or cost) of a particular activity. One company I worked for had 20 or more reviewers for each piece of marketing collateral. Each of these reviewers had to take time away from higher priority tasks to read drafts. It took forever to get consensus (too many cooks in the kitchen). In the search for "perfect," this company wasted a lot of brainpower that could have been used to solve customer problems and build new products. We finally put a price tag on all the reviewers' time. Then, we asked management, "Is this $5,000 marketing flyer worth $25,000 of review time?" Sometimes, a "crisis" comes in the form of a question.