Good Enough

The dreaded month of December

December is a really busy and stressful time on college campuses. You are probably tired and overwhelmed. You’ve been working really hard since the beginning of September. You are running on fumes and ready to crash. All you can think about is going home and sleeping for a month, but before you can do that you have to finish all of the high stakes end of term projects, papers and exams.

This is certainly not the best physical or mental condition to be in when you are facing assignments which are worth 10, 20, maybe even 30% of your grade. These types of assignments require your clearest thinking, your most insightful analysis, your sharpest memory and your most skillful manipulation of data. Finals week and all of the associated assignments and finals would be overwhelming even when you are operating at your best. Facing the end of the term when you are already burned out is beyond daunting – it’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

Running in circles and not getting anywhere

It feels like you don’t have time to get everything done. It also feels like if you drop the ball on something, the results could be catastrophic. This combination makes it extremely difficult to focus.

Rushing from one thing to another and jumping from one urgent task to the next without actually completing anything is not only stressful, but also terribly inefficient. When you work this way you’ll find that before you can immerse yourself in concentrating on one topic, you will have moved on to three others. Switching from one task to another as you follow those distractions and try to put out the multiple fires threatening to torch your academic results for the term makes you far less effective. This mental ping pong does not produce your best work, but it can still feel impossible to settle to one task while others are waiting. Constantly thinking about everything else which needs to be done makes it hard to concentrate on anything though and focused effort is what you should be striving for right now.

When you know you are working really hard and putting in long hours, but you can’t complete any one task, it’s hard to see your progress. When you know that you aren’t doing your best work on any of the assignments you are trying to complete because your attention is so fragmented, it’s hard to feel good about your efforts. To get that hit of feel-good endorphins, you need to see the results of your hard work and in those results find something you can be proud of.

Good enough

When the world feels like it’s closing in on you, it’s time to embrace the principle of good enough.

Good enough does NOT mean that you just throw something together, doing the bare minimum to squeak by with a passing grade and then call it quits. Good enough means that you stop striving for perfection and accept that your best effort this week or this month might not be as good as your best effort during a less stressful time.

Good enough also means that you are good enough regardless of the grades which show up on your transcript when this term is over. You don’t need to prove yourself by getting an A. You don’t need to heap additional stress on top of the stress inherent in a very busy month by defining your worth by your grades. You are a worthy person just by virtue of being you. You were good enough when you started this term in September and you will still be good enough in January when you start the next term.

Did you learn a few things this term? I hope so! Are you therefore already better than the good enough you were when you started the term? Absolutely! Will an A in your Calculus class mean that you are a more valuable person than a C. Nope, not even a little bit. Do you still have more to learn next term? Yes, we all have more to learn and room to grow. Does that mean that you are not good enough just as you are? No. Who you are right now is positively good enough for right now.

Expectations

Setting reasonable expectations for yourself makes finals week less exhausting and increases your level of satisfaction with your work. Accepting your best effort as good enough will make it so much easier to balance your academic workload, self-care, sleep and good mental health. Your best looks different from day to day. Over the next few weeks, your best will probably not be as good as it was a month or two ago when you had less to do and more mental and physical energy to do it. Be gentle with yourself. Accept your limits. Let go of perfection and instead strive for good enough.