How to Make the Best Of An Imperfect Work Session
because it’ll never be truly perfect
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I want to invite you to do an experiment with me: imagine releasing perfection as your goal for every work session.
I know, I know—you might feel that perfection is the only way you’re going to pull yourself out of a rut, prove your work ethic at that new job, or earn the “right” accolades to be competitive in your field of expertise.
Perhaps you think it’s the only way to “catch up,” because you’re surrounded by people who seem to be achieving perfect results on a perfect timeline: a faculty advisor who published their first book a year after they finished their PhD; your favorite business podcaster who made six figures the first month they launched; your friends who seem to all be managing work and life and parenting and self-care and look, they just signed up for a figure drawing class, how the hell did they find time for that?
All jokes aside, I get why we crave perfection.
The culture of productivity in spaces like academia, publishing, and entrepreneurship is to hike up our efficiency and produce as much high quality content as possible—often with feelings of competition, urgency, and scarcity nipping our heels. We’re often working alongside models of superstar success, which leaves us desperate to learn the secret, easy, 3-step method to thriving.
Even in an exercise that I often use as jumping off point in my writing and teaching, I see how perfectionism is woven in:
What does an ideal ___ look like?
Think: an ideal day, an ideal book launch party, an ideal first date, or, for our cases, an ideal work session.
The point of this exercise is to brainstorm our ideal outcome and then reverse engineer a plan, to-do list, and timeline to make it happen. I like the concept of reverse engineering to achieve an ideal outcome because it gets us reflecting on what we’d like to accomplish—but we can’t have an ideal experience everyday. And forcing ourselves to try and achieve perfection can cause undue stress and even potentially paralyze us for doing anything during our work sessions.
Instead, I invite us to get curious and develop an approach that feels actionable and achievable. How can we build a work session that helps us move towards our goals AND also aligns with where we’re at today in terms of time, energy, focus, and other priorities?
Here are a few methods that can help us to have a productive work session when we let go of an idealized version of perfection:
Start with a Personal Resource Check-In
I started doing personal resource check-ins when I was working on my dissertation and navigating back pain, fatigue, and brain fog. Productivity scholars often consider time, energy, and focus as resources that fuel our work, but I’m also interested in how we feel physically and emotionally during our work session. It could also be helpful to check on on your spoons (if you use Spoon Theory), physical comfort, and mood. Do you have access to supportive furniture, fidget toys, noise control, etc.? Do you need to work on or off screens today?
Try Out Good, Better, Best
My pal Katy Peplin of Thrive PhD recommends a helpful framework of aiming for good, better, and best when you set a goal for for yourself. Here’s an awesome blog post where she shares examples and other language you could use to measure your own good, better, best approaches during your work sessions.
Account for Behind The Scenes Labor
As knowledge workers, we’re working on complex projects that involve many steps. We have a tendency to measure our success in output (I wrote a book, I published an article, I submitted my tenure dossier). But too often, we forget to honor the smaller, necessary tasks that bring our projects to life: preparing, planning, collecting materials, drafting, revising, etc. When conceptualizing your work session, I invite you to count ALL of these tasks as time well spent. And if you want more resources on behind the scenes labor, check out my comprehensive blog post here.
Truly, I could have just called this newsletter “how to make the best of your work session” because surprise—every work session is going to be imperfect in some way! May these approaches help you find ways to celebrate your progress rather than admonish yourself for not doing it flawlessly.
Curiosities
I recently started using a Pilates tool called The Oov, which is basically a foam tool that you sit or stand or recline on in different postures to help strengthen your muscles. I’m interested in building my core muscles to help with back pain when I’m sitting and when I’m weight-bearing on my arms during yoga asana. While I’ve only been using it for a few weeks, the Oov is fun.
Flax seed meal energy bites! I just use the recipe on the back of the Trader Joe’s flax seed meal (here it is, but I used maple syrup instead of honey). For my fellow egg sensitive folks, flax seed meal and water also works great as an egg substitute for baking.
Megan O’Rourke (author of the The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness), wrote a newsletter called “On AI and the Writer’s Mind” where she reflects on how she’s accounting for AI use in her creative writing classes.
As genocide and human-engineered famine continues to ravage Gaza, it’s important to stay updated and share support where we can, through donations to places like the World Central Kitchen or UNRWA.
And for those who made it this far, I wanted to share a sweet story to close us out. My dog, Friday, loves to hang in my office in the morning because a big, warm sunbeam shines through my window right into her bed.
She photosynthesizes during my morning meetings, but around noon she starts to stir in anticipation of her 1pm lunchtime. Because she knows I’m a sucker, she’ll whine until I take her downstairs to go outside (my dog trainer would say this is her training me). When I take her outside to pee, she usually decides she didn’t have to pee after all and instead lays in the sunshine on the back deck, which makes me grumpy because Friday! I was WORKING!
Recently, I’ve been trying to catch myself when the grump sets in, and instead of hurrying her back inside, I sit down on the top step to soak in a little sun and invite her over to sit next to me. We both pause for a minute or two with our eyes closed, warming our faces, before I head back in to return to my desk. An unwanted break during my work session is certainly not “ideal,” but from another viewpoint, Friday’s reminding me that I should probably get up and stretch my legs every few hours. After all, a few minutes resting in the sun with my little dog is pretty perfect.
Take care and talk soon,
Dr. Kate
Email: kate@katehenry.com
Website: katehenry.com
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