For a very long time, I have had a Type A personality. I like to refer to it as being intermittently Type A, because I often fail to see a point in making my own life exceedingly difficult for the sake of accomplishing something I don't want to or don't see as important. But as soon as something becomes important to me, then I have to be the best at it. There are also a few things I must be the best at purely for the sake of being the best (or better than my peers) at something.
In a lot of ways, being a Type A is annoying even to me, because it means that I spend a lot of time wound up worrying about the outcomes of things that may or may not even matter, and making contingency plans. Is it important, for example, to have three plans for a ride somewhere? Not really, but it's exactly the kind of thing I tend to do.
In one particularly bad example, back in the eighth or ninth grade, I spent a relatively significant amount of time working on not only my part of a group project, but at least one of our classmate's component, just in case for whatever reason that classmate wasn't around or had forgotten or decided not to do it. At another time, while at the university, I did my own versions of a group member's portions of the project (which was fortunately for me, far more modular to begin with) just in case his didn't work.
In both of these cases, classmates who found out made no effort to conceal their thoughts that it was in poor taste for me to do so, and even at the time, especially in the younger instances of it, I really should have spent more time focusing on my own portions of the project, because what ended up happening was I did a larger overall portion of the project, and did a poorer job of it.
On individual projects I care about, such as TECT or even the subproject of data protection on TECT, what this particular brand of intermittent Type A behavior produces is that I'm completely incapable of thinking about the issue in a casual way. I couldn't buy a machine just a little bit better than flatdell, it had to be so much better that there is no thinking about going back. On a lot of things about TECT, perfectionism and Type-A behaviors about how I execute the project have led in a lot of cases to utter inaction for a very long time, and when I do act on something, it's to do something completely insane and off the wall, which often not only "doesn't contribute" to TECT, but actively takes away from whatever I was working on. This happened when I thought that I would try to solve my backup issues by purchasing Topham, or the time I bought a large number of poorly cooled external drives in to hook up to a netbook in an attempt to use Windows 8's storage spaces as a cheaper way to build a large pool of storage for backups.
The behavior changes from time to time too. I've gone (on the TECT backup issue) from insane action to almost complete inaction. This is annoying because some of these issues are actually fairly important and definitely merit action.
It is a difficult balancing act though, because even though action is merited, I want to make sure I'm not doing things that are straight-up insane as I am indeed wont to do.
One of the ways I mitigate this is by having a lot of projects, and padding what would otherwise be quick casual projects in self-imposed red tape. This gives me an opportunity to examine whatever I'm doing for insanity and also put some things on a schedule, so I can say that I need to have something done by a certain time. On bigger projects, one of the strategies I have is to document it heavily.
This particular activity of making some processes more formal than they need to be for my home computing and productivity environment has its own up-sides and down-sides, and I often find myself using less convenient workflow purely for the sake of supposed flexibility later down the road. A good example of this is my recent adventures with SharePoint on my home network. SharePoint is cool and in some environments it's no doubt a very powerful tool for versioning and collaboration. As it stands today, however, it's far from perfect in terms of storing every document. I suspect this will improve a lot as Microsoft makes some new applications more commonly available, but even that may not prove to be what I was hoping for, in the light of some limitations they enforce on other platforms.
In this way I often find myself continuing on a "correct" path for an indeterminate amount of time until I realize that it's either insane, or something marginally better comes along. I don't know if this is part of having some Type A tendencies, or if this is due to some other quick, possibly relating to wanting to use everything I support or use at work in my home environment, which sometimes makes me quicker to find a solution for a customer, and sometimes slows progress on my own work and projects at home.
In the end, maybe it's just the best that I can hope for that "eventually" I'll have a workable solution to some of my workflow quandaries, and some of the other things that are affected by what's ultimately just my being really interested in them. I don't think it's worth using the word "blame" to refer to what works out like me just me being really interested in doing something correctly. The question is (and remains) how much effort is it really worth putting in on the front end for potentially negligible gains in efficiency later on? And, how much does my personal interest in things like data security and information workflow affect or permit my putting in additional effort on the front of a workflow, backup, or storage solution.