I've done it… my new anti-junk mail website is live. I should probably rejoice, as I started the project over three years ago. Instead, I feel a little dissatisfied. Since launching the website I've spent hours editing the content and adding yet more stuff to my strangle list: there's still more content to be written; I haven't yet figured how to best reference sources and I'm not quite happy with the website's theme.

I also know that I'll still feel dissatisfied once I've done those tasks and that my strangle list will have become even longer, rather than shorter. I've been here before. It's not easy being a perfectionist.

Looking at it more philosophically, I should simply accept that nothing ever reaches perfection and that horizons always shift. My original goal was to rewrite the guide to stamping out junk mail and to write a history of junk mail in the UK. It didn't have to be perfect; it just needed to be good enough to replace the existing website. That goal has been achieved. I don't have to chase new horizons.

More importantly, there is beauty in imperfection. I deliberately ignored the advice in the thousands of guides for writing website content, as it would just result in boilerplace articles that might as well have been written by a machine. To my mind, writing needs to have a bit of personality. It needs to be a creative endeavour. That does mean that some of the pages are rather verbose, which I'm sure will annoy people looking for quick answers. There will also be some muddled sentences and embarrassing spelling mistakes. Much as I try, I won't be able to make the content perfect… but at least it's authentic. (Plus, people looking for quick answers can nowadays use a chatbot to provide a concise summary of an article. There is no need to write like a robot.)

I'll try to not touch the website for a while. There are two other projects I like to get off the ground during my sabbatical, and they are equally ambitious. And of course, they also have to be done to perfection.