Do you ever get your knickers in a knot about the whole, “Do I give it my all” or “Do I phone it in” conundrum?

If you are a perfectionist, the idea of phoning it in makes you want to breathe into a paper bag.

If you are a “Good is good enough” type, giving it your all feels like a waste of precious life when you could be out learning how to surf.

How do you know when the time is right to give it your all… versus… maybe not half-assing it, but maybe quarter-assing it?

Benefits of going all in:

• You feel proud when it works out.
• You get to honor your presumed value(s) of excellence and accomplishment.
• Your sense of self-worth—especially if it’s contingent on the terms of perfection—definitely gets the ding, ding, ding sound.
• Things are done just so, so you don’t have to worry about stupid typos after the fact.

Cons of going all in:

• It usually takes more time.
• It can be exhausting.
• You might miss out on other cool things that are passing you by because you are spending the 17th pass on your PowerPoint presentation, for a purely hypothetical example.

Benefits of quarter-assing it and phoning it in:

• You get to spend your time on things that are ostensibly more important in your life.
• You might get more done in the long run because you aren’t wasting time fiddling with flawlessness.
• You learn to prioritize when good is enough and when done is better than excellent.

Cons of quarter-assing it and phoning it in:

• You may never get the full satisfaction that goes along with a job well done, not just done.
• If you’ve chosen the wrong project to quarter-ass, you could end up looking like a full ass.

This isn’t a black or white situation, is it? We’re not deciding we must Commit Fully with All of Our Gusto to Every Single Project for the End of Time… just as we’re not committing to Mailing In Every Single Project, Just for The Sake of Completion, for the End of Time.

Isn’t there merit in judiciously deciding when certain circumstances warrant 110% effort versus 70% effort?

I remember hearing about an interview with the actor John Goodman. The gist of it was that he would fully immerse himself in every single role, even if it was a relatively menial one. Someone asked him why he did that… why he gave so much of himself for something that maybe wouldn’t offer that much of a return. His answer stuck with me. He said, “Because I get to.” The privilege of being able to work in a tough industry and actually get work made him feel grateful and willing and wanting to give it his all, even for the small roles. Imagine taking pride in everything with your name on it?

(I asked ChatGPT for the source on this interview and coming up with nothing, it basically told me, “You totally made that shit up,” to which I responded [in my head so the robots won’t come for me first when they absolutely start coming for us], “Dude, you make shit up all the time. It takes one to know one.”)

So this sounds like I’m promoting the “I Give It My All Because I Get To” camp, and sometimes I do promote this way of living. Accomplishment is one of the empirically based pillars of well-being!

On the flip side, what about the times when the stakes aren’t so high? When we might be chasing our little tails by tinkering with the paper/ the proposal/ the project/ the painting, the whatever, for a little too long—when getting an A isn’t really worth the extra effort because your GPA is irrelevant, when slaving over the wording of an email is kinda inconsequential? Are those hours we could have spent doing anything else to bring us joy? Perhaps hours spent sleeping? Playing with a kid? Spelunking? Perhaps hours spent DOING ANYTHING other than toiling at something that technically didn’t matter that much in the end?

Now you’ve got me going. Technically nothing really matters in the end. We’ll all be dead in a matter of Mondays! And so it’s up to us to decide in each and every moment when it’s worth it, and when it’s not, to give our time and energy and attention to each and every task and moment and opportunity.

I remember when I was in grad school, I toyed with this “make everything a masterpiece” vs. “mail it in” mentality. The Husband was in a different grad school program at the same time, and I think we were both kind of giving it our all with every paper, every assignment. And then there were some times when we wanted to just enjoy a Sunday afternoon, dammit, and we’d say to ourselves, okay, let’s go for just average on our respective papers today. Don’t shoot for the moon, just shoot for Pluto (that poor, demoted planet). Let’s just get it done. Who cares what our grades are? We’d both look at each other with conviction. We would both go to our respective offices and sit down, and we were both totally unable to Pluto it. So then we missed a bunch of Sunday afternoons doing whatever we fantasized about (watching Columbo reruns on TV?).

Satisficing is a concept that asks, “what is a ‘good enough’ outcome” and I know many a successful satisficer. Research shows that people who can choose “good enough” tend to report more well-being than people who keep searching for the absolute best—known as maximizers—especially when maximizing involves endless comparison, regret, and second-guessing. This has more to do with decision making than effort giving, but the “good enough” point still lands.

If I could go back now, I don’t know if I would do grad school differently… if I would try any less hard… because I know that work ethic and achievement and being a total fucking dork are three of my top 10 values. But I do know I need to recalibrate and stop spending so much time nitpicking over the way my doodles look, or whether or not I put enough crap on social media this week (gahhhh… is it everrrrrr enough????).

What about you? What projects on your plate do you need to maybe do a little bit of quarter-assing on? Or maybe you need to do a little more extra-miling instead? Effort is in the eye of the beholder. And so is what it takes to live like we mean it. I like that we get to choose when to give it the most vs. let it coast.