The Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Done
Chapter 14
This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Creating and Maintaining Living Spaces That Make Your Life Better (In Spite Of Everything) by Hanne Blank Boyd.
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Not every dessert has to be created painstakingly from the purest and most refined ingredients by a Michelin-starred pastry chef to be delicious and provide pleasure. It can also be a fistful of Oreos and a glass of milk.
(I mean, if you’re me it can be a fistful of Oreos and a glass of milk. For you, maybe you those delicious little Mexican wedding cookies that I love but always leave me lightly dusted with powdered sugar, and maybe you want a cup of coffee with them. If I’m honest I could swing that way myself now and then, as long as I’m not wearing black.)
The same thing is true of household work. Not every single living space task has to be done perfectly in every respect or completed with absolute rigor and total thoroughness every single time in order to be a worthwhile thing that improves your quality of life. At least some of the time it can also be a good enough job that keeps things functional in the short term.
It’s okay, for instance, to just give the kitchen countertops a quick wipedown at the end of the day even if you don’t actually move the toaster and the knife block and the cookbook holder thingy and the air fryer all out of the way so you can clean the entire counter and make sure there aren’t any crumbs or splatters hiding under or behind or between them. Is it a good idea to do all that? Sure it is. But here at the First Church of the Good Enough Job we uphold the principle that it’s really not necessary to do it every single time. You can keep your kitchen sanitary and pleasant to work in and only do all those things some of the time.
By the same token, you don’t have to be really good at doing the task to be able to be effective at it. I will admit to you, and my spouse will confirm, that I am not the greatest at loading the dishwasher. In fact, when I read a draft of this chapter to my husband, he laughed out loud and said “You are the worst at loading the dishwasher! Put that in the book!”
Loading a dishwasher may seem like a weird thing to be bad at, but I am. I’ve just never really gotten the hang of doing it efficiently. That doesn’t mean I can’t do it at all. It doesn’t mean I don’t do it. I don’t do it as well as it could possibly be done. But the choice is that either it gets done in a mediocre kind of way or it doesn’t get done at all? Well, in that case it matters more that it gets done. It’s okay that my husband thinks it’s ridiculous how I do it.
The perfect is the enemy of the done. I have had to remind myself of that with every single book I’ve ever written in order to just get myself to stop fucking around with it trying to make it bulletproof. When I was a college professor I had to remind my students of it every time term paper due dates were approaching and they started to get that sweaty look that said they were about to ask me for an extension. Whenever I work with writers, which is something I love to do, I have to remind them, too. Eventually you just have to decide that you’ve done the thing well enough and it’ll just have to do.
In exactly the same spirit, I’m reminding you that doing the thing is what matters. Learning how to do the thing expertly and with virtuoso joie de vivre is fantastic if you can swing it. It’s just not always necessary. Get the job done first, then worry about whether or not you deserve an award for how brilliantly you performed.
Doing the thing as completely as you’re able, whatever that may be in any given moment, is as much as anyone can ask. Doing it at all absolutely does count, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Doing it at all is the only thing that matters, in fact. If something doesn’t exist, or hasn’t happened, then you can’t exactly have feelings about how it was done. And yeah, I realize that this is precisely the reason people don’t do things sometimes. If you don’t do it at all no one can tell you you did it wrong. But if you don’t do it at all and not having done it means that you suffer in some way because you didn’t, that’s not exactly a net improvement.
When it comes to doing the things that keep your day to day life going, workable beats perfect every time. Keeping a household functioning is not an all or nothing proposition. Few things in life are. Even if it feels like you’re doing the most pathetic, limpest, baby-step version of the thing, doing some version of it is truly better than saying fuck it and doing nothing.
The perfect is the enemy of the done.
Or, as I said to one of my young cousins one night when he apologized that he was being half-assed about something he was doing, “Never forget, my friend: In the valley of the assless, the half-assed man is king.”
It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself is ©2024 by Hanne Blank Boyd. All Rights Reserved.
Normally, these posts are for paid subscribers only. This one’s a freebie for everyone. I hope you like it! If you do, why not subscribe?
Click here for the full It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself table of contents.