Less than perfection is often excellent

Perfection is highly overrated. I’ve never been called an overachiever or a workaholic, and in my book, that’s okay.  I think G.K. Chesteron said (and he said a lot of things, so he probably said this or something close to it), “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing not well.”   Sometimes perfectionism is really just procrastination dressed up in respectable clothes.

This is true in all aspects of the academic life.  Sometimes you just have to let go of an essay and see what happens.   Sometimes you don’t need to read or read the minutes from that last committee meeting.  Sometimes you don’t need to plan a class down to the last second of the hour.    A large part of good time management is deciding how much is enough.

Planning for teaching is a great example.  When I first started teaching as an assistant professor, I dedicated hours and hours to preparing a one hour lecture/discussion class.  For the three hours I taught that course per week, I spent about ten or twelve hours preparing.  It was very frustrating since I would either rush through material just to fit in everything I had planned, or I would leave out things and feel that I had failed since I didn’t get to everything.  When I complained about my problem one day at the café, a colleague from another department said, “Listen, you’re doing too much.  Overpreparing is worse than underpreparing.  Don’t spend more than an hour preparing for an hour-long class.”  I followed her advice, and it was very liberating for both me and my students.  My teaching improved dramatically–students even commented on it on the course evaluations.  I kept forgetting that I was the expert, I knew this stuff, and as long as I had a basic structure to follow and had thought about techniques to convey the information, I didn’t have to try to “cram it all in.”