Another theme I have noticed among academics is a perfectionism that often leads us to spend more time on things (especially TRQ) than we have. I tried to grade papers perfectly, cook perfectly, clean the house perfectly, and have found that way lies madness. Rather than do what Erma Bombeck suggested--saw the room one never has time to clean off the house--what can we do?
There are things one cannot delegate, most often grading, and those that one can, cleaning, cooking, and laundry. I have tried to define the notion of “good enough,” from the popular dissertation strategy that a done dissertation is a good dissertation, but I am not always successful. Contingent Cassandra mentioned early in this session that grading is a redoubling task, where students ask questions about grades and comments, making more work than the original task. However, finding the point at which diminishing returns may be helpful in preserving time for other tasks.
Then there are things that one can delegate, whether to another household member or to a paid service. No one in my house puts the dishes away correctly, but I have found that I am more sane if I focus on my not having to put them away instead of things not being in the right place. If the person I delegate/pay to clean my house doesn’t do things the way I do, I have to weigh the mental cost as well as the financial cost. However, I have found that the house being clean greatly outweighs my need to have it done the way I want it done. If you are not in a position to delegate or pay someone, deciding what amount of mess/microwave meals/dirty clothing is worth the time to do something else may well be beneficial.
There are also things that take time, but pay mental dividends. I can certainly buy socks instead of knitting them, but the zen of knitting is important to my continued well being. I can buy baked goods, but homemade pastries fill more than my stomach. These things are worth doing perfectly, as long as the pursuit of perfection doesn’t lead one to stress and lack of enjoyment.
And finally, there are the TLQ things, which can be a mixed bag of things that can be relegated to the “good enough” realm--papers that one “has” to do but that are not of great interest, for example. But there are topics that do interest one, in the way many of us have described the research that is not central to our jobs, but meet a curiosity or interest.
How do you deal with perfectionist tendencies, if you have them? If you have hints or strategies, please share.
Allan wilson:
1) resubmit whk paper
2)do a bit of the mapping stuff
3) take my daughter out once on her own
4) do a bit of relaxing and refocusing my brain. Rest, chocolate, and contacting an old friend.
Contingent Cassandra:
1. Increase exercise (walks and weight-lifting and perhaps some gardening, but especially walks)
2. Try to get sleep schedule better coordinated w/ DST (taking into account some latish nights due to Holy Week services) and keep up decent eating
3. At least get a start on taxes
Daisy:
Enjoy conference, trip, and give a great talk.
Danne: (from Week 10)
-Touch thesis daily
-Write daily
Earnest English:
1. Research: 3x
2. Health: take care. Good food. Good sleep. Moderate emotions.
3. Family: be kind.
4. Gardening: nope
5. Grading: somehow get it done??? magic? leprechauns?
Elizabeth Anne Mitchell:
1) Continue to work ½ hour a day on footnote revisions. If met, reward myself with ½ hour on researching the sabbatical topic.
2) File 15 minutes twice a day. If met, reward with reading a frivolous novel for ½ hour.
3) Plan for 15 minutes--in the car, if necessary (thanks to GEW for the suggestion).
Good Enough Woman:
1) write 500 words for intro
2) read one article or chapter
3) read 50 pages of a primary source
4) Pay attention to recent minor health complaints of children. Evaluate whether to not I need to take them in.
Heu mihi:
-Read J's ST
-Notes on relevant passages/ideas for Kzoo paper
-N article (German): get a handle on it (what’s relevant?)
-N article (English)
-Read first half of C (for undergrad class)
-Synthesize talk with Chapter 3
-Look at notes on Augustinian reading with caritas
Humming42:
1 Data collection for paper #1
2 Finish and submit abandoned book review
3 Read through current manuscript draft
4 Begin drafting paper #2
JaneB:
1) another hour on Picky Paper and two hours on DrVisit Paper 2
2) wrap and send small presents for Easter to immediate family
3) make a conference/travel list for the rest of the year and make cattery bookings
4) look in three more piles for the passport, and spend half an hour a day creating order somewhere within the house.
5) bed before midnight, 5 fruit & veg a day, little steps…
KJHaxton:
no work! Knit something. Get out into the fresh air as much as possible. Tick off a few more books on my Good Reads challenge (currently at 13/52 so 'two ahead of schedule').
For the half week after, put a solid day or two into acronym to get it almost done. Finish tidying.
Susan:
1. Remarks for conference next week (it's a roundtable, so 10 minutes of think piece, not a paper)
2. Organize last bit of summer vacation
3. Begin work on paper revisions that keep getting pushed to the bottom of the pile
4. Keep up with exercise. Walk once
5. Finish weeding the garden! For 10 seconds, I want NO WEEDS!
I think what perfectionism I have comes out in the things I don't do more than the things I do. What do I mean? I mean that this sabbatical application, for example, is going very slowly. There's no fixed deadline for it, and no one asking for it. I've let all my neuroses about the way my department values Secondary Field make me feel that the app has to be perfect -- and therefore it doesn't get done. The other way my perfectionism surfaces for me is not in thinking that any one task has to be done perfectly, but that I should be able to do lots of different things well. Instead of engaging in tasks perfectly, I feel I should be a perfect person, able to balance lots of work and home projects. In short, I spread my self too thin and have struggled a lot with totally unreasonable expectations of myself (especially considered that I don't have a ton of energy). This spreading myself too thin happens at every level -- too many research projects, too many service projects, too many homestead projects, too many hopes regarding homeschooling and parenting. A wise mentor I had once said that my problem, and she was talking only about my various research projects, was that I didn't want to choose one thing to focus on and move that forward, but that I wanted to move everything forward at once. (This helped me see that if I was intent on doing that, then I'd move very slowly on everything, which has helped me not get frustrated with my slow progress.) I push myself to do at-home things because I feel like I should do them, shouldn't just let my working stand in for doing everything at home. The details I used to care about -- like crumbs in the butter -- I just try to not see. This is why I love this group -- it keeps me thinking about my own goals and gives me some accountability on those while forcing me to be realistic -- and why I love deadlines and ideas of "good enough."
ReplyDeleteLast Week
1. Research: 3x 2-1/2 DONE
2. Health: take care. Good food. Good sleep. Moderate emotions. YES, even took yesterday off
3. Family: be kind. YES
4. Gardening: nope !!!
5. Grading: somehow get it done??? magic? leprechauns? DID AN AMAZING JOB OF GRADING LAST WEEKEND AND UNTIL THURSDAY MORNING, BUT THEN CRAPPED OUT AND HAVEN'T GRADED SINCE PER HEALTH
Last week was the final week of the quarter and by Thursday afternoon, I just wanted it to be OVER. It's now over, and I have a ton of grading to do, starting, ideally, today, though it's Easter and even though that's not a big holiday for us, we've got eggs to decorate and plastic eggs to hide. How to do it all? I have no idea.
This Week's Goals
1. Research: 3x.
2. Health: go get x-ray; put leg up; de-stress while grading somehow.
3. Family: spend some time with Spirited! go out to dinner a couple times this week.
4. Gardening: zero goals on this right now.
5. Grading: I must grade. I have a ton. I've got to moderate my emotions about it and just get it done. Not get frustrated. Not freak out on my family. Just plod along and get it done.
I suffer from both kinds of perfectionism as well, Earnest. I ended up doing a grant application that came up last minute on my secondary field, and I agonized that it had to be perfect.
DeleteI also expect to be able to juggle way too many things, and get very depressed when I can't.
I'm glad that you are taking better care of yourself, too.
Yes! I totally know what you mean about being the do-everything person. Woman. Because my do-everything-ness is very much involved with being ideally female (in my housekeeping etc.) as well as being an ideal professional and miscellaneous human being.
Deleteheu mihi, you're totally right that this do-everythingness has a lot to do with gender. I suck at housework of almost every kind and Absurdist Husband is great at lots of it, yet I feel I should do the dishes or the laundry or whatever because I'm female. If I were male, would I feel that I should work all day and then also do the housework or be a great parent or whatever? I've spoken with and about other women breadwinners, and shortchanging one's self and one's needs (downtime? what's that?) in order to try to do it all seems to be a major theme. (Not that this is what's going on in your case, but it does seem to me that we working women seem to feel that's not enough and we need to be the angel in the house too! I swear sometimes it feels like I'm apologizing for being a working woman!)
DeleteNot a lengthy comment on the prompt, because I want to go to bed, but: This week, I SKIMMED a book for my grad class. In like 20 minutes. I could have spent every spare bit of a minute this weekend reading it, only to fall far short, or I could have done what I did. Note that it's not a book that my students are reading, but one that it would make sense for them to ask me about, and one that I have read in the past, so any rational person would have done what I did...but my tendency is to read every single word of everything, and this absolutely kills me. So I see this as a huge success.
ReplyDeleteLast week's goals:
-Read J's ST - DONE
-Notes on relevant passages/ideas for Kzoo paper - DONE
-N article (German): get a handle on it (what’s relevant?) - I don’t need to read it-DONE
-N article (English) - DONE, I THINK
-Read first half of C (for undergrad class) NOT DONE
-Synthesize talk with Chapter 3 - DONE
-Look at notes on Augustinian reading with caritas - DONE
This week:
1) Read 4 seminar papers
2) Read/skim first half of J's LT
3) Notes on relevant passages/ideas for Kzoo paper
4) BMK part 1
5) Finish C
6) Bibliography for Kzoo paper
7) Grade undergrad papers
I wanted to take a graduate class this semester, but I knew that I would read every single work of every assignment, ahead of doing things like reading for classes I am teaching or getting actual research projects finished. That skimming is a victory resonates so strongly with me.
DeleteHi folks! I'm not really a perfectionist per se, but I've come to understand my forays into perfectionism as more a particular variety of procrastination - either postponing finishing something (because I don't want to hand it over, or do the next task) by unnecessary polishing, or postponing doing anything because of not having the resources to do it perfectly (the task becomes steadily more daunting... housework particularly. I guess I've always seen myself as something of a 'failed female' because I've never been at all tidy or deft or dainty, taken much pleasure in housework, been much good at it - and being single and childless and human-roommate-less makes it kind of easy to indulge in that failure, if that makes any sense).
ReplyDeleteSome "useful" things that come to mind on the work front:
* my PhD supervisor gave me some very good advice about the first problem - he said I should always aim to give work to him, submit it to a journal or to readers when I thought it was good but could still see that it needed work. That way I'd be much more open to comments and corrections, and not fall foul of the 80% rule (it takes x time to get the thing 80% done, but then it takes x to get it 80% better than that (96%), then x to get that 80% better (99.2% right), but now you've spent 3x and it's still not perfect and you will be MUCH more defensive about any flaws people see and much more behind on your writing schedule).
* remember you can only have two of great/cheap/quick, and when it comes to TLQ work, the 'cheap' bit refers to spending parts of yourself - time, attention, energy, emotion, whatever a particular thing 'costs'
* Teaching and working with students really helps me battle this, as I often meet students who need to get over the hurdles of having to be perfect, competing with impossible standards, having to get stuff right first time... and I don't want to be hypocritical, so I need to follow the good advice I can give them!
* I have gotten good at the mental trick of putting off the time when I need to be perfect - zero drafts, freewriting, telling the inner editor to s*d off for now, and all sorts of messy, scrappy methods of overcoming the tyranny of the blank page get something produced, which can then be shaped over a couple of drafts. I do dislike all the final details, one reason I enjoy writing with PDF as she hates drafts and reshaping but is happy to chase down, type in and format references, check details of every last number and endnote and caption, and all that cr*p one needs for publication.
last week's goals:
Delete1) another hour on Picky Paper and two hours on DrVisit Paper 2 yes to picky paper, no to DrVisit paper
2) wrap and send small presents for Easter to immediate family yes
3) make a conference/travel list for the rest of the year and make cattery bookings list yes, bookings no
4) look in three more piles for the passport, and spend half an hour a day creating order somewhere within the house. no and some days
5) bed before midnight, 5 fruit & veg a day, little steps… not consistently
Well, that was a where-did-the-time-go week to say the least. But enjoyable. I got back into reading stuff, I achieved a few small things, I slept a lot, and I feel more human.
Next week (well this week, I'm writing this on Monday, which is a bank holiday here) should be packed, really, there are a lot of things to do. However, it may end up with a lot of idleness in it as they're not 100% urgent, and the usual 'I slowed down and actually, a lot of stuff is catching up with me/becoming clear and I need some time to recover/deal with emotions/I'm actually remembering that I'm about 90% sloth' syndrome.
I do have to provide detailed feedback on multiple 8000 word drafts for undergraduates (wah) and write a fairly significant administrative document (double wah) and referee an article. I'd also like to make some TLQ progress on writing stuff whilst students are away (well, most students), as there'll be a big pile of grading soon (statistics final reports, sigh). So goals (possibly/probably overly ambitious):
1) 2 hours on Dr Visit paper
2) block out Ferretty paper (I get a week off Picky Paper because that has some momentum now and is better suited to working on around grading and the like (and for now on my office PC which has a faster processer)).
3) daily at least half hours on chaos reduction
4) make 3 phone calls I keep putting off (cattery and two self-care appointments I need to make)
5) search 3 piles for the damn passport
Topic: I struggle with this one. If anything, I think I'm a too-far-recovered perfectionist, especially when it comes to housekeeping and teaching. On the other hand, I'm aware that, in both areas, I've become all too aware over the years of just how long things really take (and just how hard I'm going to find it to pull myself away once I really get into a task), and that there really aren't enough hours in the day. So I wait until there is really time to spend on a job (which doesn't happen all that frequently), or until there's only so much time to fill with a job, and get it done semi-satisfactorily (if at all -- obviously, housekeeping can slide a lot more than teaching) in that time. So I'm really not sure where I stand on all of this. The most obvious example right now is that, as I've said before, I cultivate a certain amount of willful blindness to all the undone housekeeping/homemaking/organizational chores surrounding me in my studio apartment, because I can't go into a study or living room to work (as I did when I lived in a full-size house) and leave them behind (I also realized when I lived in that house that if I'm going to have a study with a view to the outdoors -- which I love -- the view should not be of an area designated to a major planned but uncompleted gardening project). But the blindness isn't complete, and the projects nag at and distract me, which suggests that completing some of them would be a good use of time (but see awareness of the time such things take -- once you start moving things around in an overcrowded studio apartment you can create pretty much complete chaos very quickly. Believe me; I've done it).
ReplyDeleteLast week's goals:
1. Increase exercise (walks and weight-lifting and perhaps some gardening, but especially walks)
2. Try to get sleep schedule better coordinated w/ DST (taking into account some latish nights due to Holy Week services) and keep up decent eating
3. At least get a start on taxes
Accomplished: well, I ate pretty regularly and reasonably well. That's about it.
Analysis: I tend to forget just how much of the usually-available non-work time Holy Week activities (services and rehearsals for same and contributions to the housekeeping/prep aspects of same) take up. There are also several late services and/or rehearsals, which tend to disrupt my sleep schedule. I have no desire to stop doing any of it -- one doesn't blow off the central religious observation of one's faith, even if it tends to come at an inconvenient time of the year -- but I do need to learn to plan ahead a bit better, and remember just how little free time there is this week. Things were exacerbated a bit this year by several people asking me -- very kindly -- to dinner and other events (probably a bit more than in a usual year, in sympathy w/ my recent loss, I'm pretty sure), but still, it's just a reality of my yearly calendar, and I need to have it not take me by surprise (file this as another case of increasingly realistic awareness of where my time goes -- and both the good and bad aspects thereof).
So, goals for the coming week are going to look a bit familiar:
1. Increase exercise (walks and weight-lifting and perhaps some gardening, but especially walks)
2. Try to get sleep schedule better coordinated w/ DST and keep up decent eating
3. Make a substantial start on taxes
Yes on the overly recovered perfectionist. Thank you for giving me a place to start figuring out how I am not a perfectionist but still struggle with projects in similar ways.
DeleteI commented last week but my post disappeared once again...
ReplyDeleteThesis:
4 days
Fiction:
5 days
Not bad, though I'm not quite there yet.
Next week:
-Touch thesis three times (Thu-Sat)
-finish Mohawk book
-Write daily
I keep grappling with this topic, trying to determine if I still hold on to what were once very significant perfectionist tendencies. I think I’ve learned to negotiate with those parts of my brain that want everything to be just-so. It’s one of those things about getting older and coming to terms with being satisfied with what I know is good enough instead of making myself crazy trying to make everything magnificent.
ReplyDeleteLast week
1 Data collection for paper #1: yes
2 Finish and submit abandoned book review: no
3 Read through current manuscript draft: no
4 Begin drafting paper #2: yes
Analysis: I did some manuscript tasks including reading and typing up notes. After conference, I will sit down and read through the manuscript draft. The book review has the blessing and curse of an editor who says, “No deadline! Just send it in when you can.” I have not managed to keep a self-imposed deadline on this, for months upon months.
This week, conference deadlines loom so it’s all about that.
1 Solid draft of paper #1
2 Complete draft of paper #2
3 Organize notes and prepare outline for roundtable discussion
Well it's a late check in but I'm just back from holiday and struggling to focus on anything in particular so am doing the little things.
ReplyDeleteI think this topic for discussion is a good one. I often tell my students that they need to do the best they can under the circumstances and that any time they walk into an exam/submit work and say 'I could not reasonably have done more', it's a good day regardless of outcome. It sounds like a cop out in some ways but we can always unreasonably do more but we shouldn't. And good enough is precisely that, particularly for TRQ stuff.
Last week: holiday, much reading (12 books in 12 days...) some knitting (the 3rd hat is pulled back and restarted far better, new wool has been purchased), lots of fresh air and rain, walking and a nice break. I'm now at 23/52 books for my GoodRead Challenge (https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/3825517). Some were serious novels, some simply fluff reading.
The remainder of this week: if I can focus, acronym report needs some serious time and effort. And tidying a bit more.
I apologize for such late check-in and for disappearing this week.
ReplyDeleteTopic: Good Enough
I am a recovering perfectionist, where some days are better than others. As several of you mentioned, I feel I should do everything perfectly, as well as many things very well at one time. It is a frequent struggle for me. The worst of it is that I shut down when I do not perform to my perceived potential, closing myself off from friends, who are often helpful in pointing out my crazy expectations.
So, I am going to try my own advice in the post--let’s see how that works!
Last week’s goals:
1) Continue to work ½ hour a day on footnote revisions. If met, reward myself with ½ hour on researching the sabbatical topic. The footnotes got blown out of the water by two grant applications--one for me and one for my department.
2) File 15 minutes twice a day. If met, reward with reading a frivolous novel for ½ hour. Only one or two days worth, but I did enjoy the frivolous reading.
3) Plan for 15 minutes--in the car, if necessary (thanks to GEW for the suggestion). I haven’t had to use the car, yet, but I may at some point. I do stop at a coffee shop in order to plan, and so far, that is working well.
Analysis: My dean announced last Monday that no one had applied for a small grant, and that the deadline had been extended to Thursday. I had been looking into sabbatical projects, so I carved off a little piece for a chance to get a bit of travel money. Then a regional consortium announced another small grant that would be very beneficial for my department, so it was off to the races yet again. Finally, my family is fed up with the rental house we’ve been in for four years, so we have started looking at houses to buy. The combined stress has been monumental.
I am also struggling with a dip into depression. I find March a very difficult month, and the forecast for snow on Sunday just caps the month perfectly.
Next week’s goals:
1) Return to work ½ hour a day on footnote revisions. If met, reward myself with ½ hour on researching the sabbatical topic.
2) File 15 minutes twice a day. If met, reward with reading a frivolous novel for ½ hour.
3) Plan for 15 minutes--coffee shop or in the car, if necessary.