I don't know about yours, but my life is like a Tetris game, on advanced level: pieces, called tetrominoes, are falling at high speed; incomplete lines appear very frequently at the bottom; random squares pop into existence trying to change your mind at the very last moment; and all types of chirps and sounds bleep alongside a tenacious music while a mysterious Russian dancer becomes impatient (or excited?) to see how your game is almost over.
It is very easy to suck at Tetris, exactly as easy as sucking in a busy life. We start our game, or are born, and the rules are already out there, easy to learn, impossible to change. They make your game difficult, but are not the cause of we sucking at it. On the contrary, they bring opportunities to excel if played well. The problem is our philosophy behind the game, and yes, every one has a tetrilosophy, consciously or not.
The most common one: since we are asked to complete rows, it is therefore good to be extremely well ordered while arranging pieces, and having the priority to avoid every potential empty square. This sounds impeccable: if we leave no empty spaces, complete rows will come naturally. But wait a minute! Imagine our top profile is quite rugged and a square tetromino comes. To avoid voids, we place it in the only flat surface we have available. Then, next piece is again a square. Of course, we place it on top of the previous one. That seems the way to achieve perfect order. The only problem is that, if provided with several consecutive squares, this seems more a suicide than anything else. While pursuing perfection we achieve a perfect disaster.
Another case: we have a three-void column, and of course we wait for a straight tetromino. Only that it does not come, but we refuse again and again to half-fill it with an imperfect solution. This comes at the expense of dramatically increasing the height of our profile. Most often than not, when the good piece comes, if ever, it is already too late. After that, we can complain about our bad luck, about our almost perfect order. We were close to perfection, but some superior and hidden being, the one deciding the next pieces, was against us.
Let's not fool ourselves: by playing perfectionism we deserve to read "game over" as soon as possible. We even deserve to be punished by the Tetragod. Perfectionism is just sucking, but squared. The perfectionist player plays badly, and after losing, nothing will be learned, since the game is justified as almost perfect and only bad luck or small refinements seem to be worth commenting. But this is bullshit: perfectionist tetrilosophy is 100 % wrong, at its very core. Let's see why.
For sure, as long as pieces can be perfectly placed without losing, I have nothing to say, just go ahead. The problem is that the game is not about perfection, but about completing rows. This point is tricky, since in order for a row to be deleted, it needs to be completed, and thus perfect. But it is subtler than that. Many times we have the choice between completing a single row with an imperfect move and waiting for a better move that will allow to complete two, three or even four simultaneous rows (a Tetris, for which you earn 800 points). So there is a trade-off between a dirty choice that will keep the height of your profile low and a beautiful promised move that may come or not, but one that meanwhile makes your profile higher and closer to the end. By playing perfectionism you increase your risk, but do you really improve the beauty of your game? I think quite the contrary: you just show everyone how much you suck at this game.
In my opinion, if the game is about completing rows, you jump at every opportunity to complete one. Sure, there are many considerations here: evaluate the less dirty move that still completes rows, evaluate the next piece that is announced on the side, take small risks when they may be worth waiting, etc. But the point I want to make here is that, when changed my tetrilosophy from perfectionism to rowcompletionism, my scores leapt dramatically. From hitting a wall of about 100000, I am now able to surpass 200000, and without the feeling of having a ceiling yet. Needless to say, I only play very occasionally. All this Tetris discussion is just to make the following point: that a busy life is very similar to this game, and that I have played the perfectionist, also known as the perfect sucker, for too long. My plan is to change my game in life as well.
Take the calendar for, say, next month or next week. That could be one stage of the game. Emails, messages and all types of interactions inevitably lead to meetings, appointments and all types of nonsense that will try to make us forget what the game is about: completing rows. These rows are papers we need to publish, but also workout or yoga sessions we need to keep your health, or good times that we need to enjoy. A beautifully empty playground where great things can happen: achievement, growth, joy... unless we start blundering and fill it with an enormous mountain of crappy architecture that leaves us less time to think and less margin to react. Most of the times, the month is over, the amount of completed lines is very low and I try to forget it and think that next month will be better. Perhaps I will have more luck, because what god-damn pieces I got this time! And I was that close to make two consecutive Tetris that would ended in a great success!
It is well known that our brains cannot work in parallel and that they don't like to recover from interruptions. This amounts to say that, in a naively ideal game, all pieces should come in a loop of (straight, straight, square, straight, straight), so that we could work sequentially and perfectly aligned with out Darwinian features. Well, it does not work exactly like that. A task is a line, but the pieces we are given are of different shapes, which means we are forced to work in parallel, it doesn't matter if you or you brain like it or not. But interestingly, Tetris game captures quite well the fact that we can only keep a reduced set of tasks at once. If we bury a line for too long, it becomes almost inaccessible. The best profiles are more or less horizontal, with only a few lines being constructed at a time. So, if you can't do all your task in a single stroke and there is 20 % of it left, be sure that you complete it at the slightest opportunity. Tetris seems to be suggesting us that the optimal approach is to work in an almost sequential form, although not in a perfect sense. Naive sequentialism is impossible and parallelism is catastrophic. The sweet point seems to lie in a rugged sequentialism where you prioritise finishing the tasks albeit not in a pure way. I find this beautiful: clever, purposeful and effective imperfections as a way to realistic improvement and tangible progress.
In conclusion, if you want to be a good busy-life player, you better start completing rows at the slightest opportunity, training your brain in the process to adapt to such an uncomfortable dynamics. Don't even try to organise anything beyond your current piece and a few consecutive ones. Don't forget what is the point of this game and don't be lured into the perfectionist crap, which will parallelise and paralyse you. If a task is really big, break into well defined lines, otherwise it will never be completed. And, interestingly, don't see pieces as crap. Of course they may be crappy, but if you don't want them, retire or go to a monastery or simply stop playing. Once you willingly start the game, the only potential crap is in the resulting architecture, which is nothing but a manifestation of your bad decisions accumulated over time.
In any case, please don't take this too seriously! The parallelism between Tetris and a busy life has strong limitations, although they don't spoil the fact that in both playgrounds we fall prey to the perfect-or-disaster dualism. I find it funny to learn lessons and attitudes from games, and Tetris is not the only one to learn from. Perhaps another day we could discuss how Galaxian is a great metaphor as well, where you can have systematic, important plans but ultimately end up focusing on "exceptions" that are so frequent that they become the norm.
UPDATE: After some fruitful discussions, an interesting way to summarise tetrilosophy in the form of a principle came up. Something like this: The sequence of individually optimal moves does not necessarily lead to a globally optimal (or just good) result. The latter can be the aggregation of partially suboptimal moves. Or, in short: optimal ≠ sum(optimal_i,i). Or, equivalently, perfectionsm = myopia of mind.