Developing good habits makes life run so much more smoothly. Bad habits – combined with random poor choices – makes everything much less easy. Doing good work makes life simpler because you don’t need to fix it, repeat it, or apologize for it nearly as often. On the other end of the scale is the striving for perfect habits or perfect work.
Sometimes we do a really good – nearly perfect – job at something but my experience has been more that aiming for that perfect keeps us from being happy with the pretty darn good. Or keeps us from starting in the first place, knowing we won’t hit that “perfect”. Hello, procrastination.
In my late 20s I started trying to do good more than perfect. Good and done gets you much further than perfect and not done. Good habits, tweaked and refined, get you so much further than not bothering at all. Screwing up is to be expected but if you get the fixing and being embarrassed over quickly, you can get back into the the doing good.
I have a few innocuous good habits that make my life simpler. One of those is tiny: I load the coffee maker the night before. Another is less tiny: I meal plan the week, each week. For work, I batch shipping, production, material prepping wherever I can. When there’s an order for an item that isn’t made yet, I always make extra. I ship in the mornings instead of as orders come in.
There are quite a lot of good work habits I’m trying to adopt: keeping to my production schedule more rigorously. Keeping up the social media for my various projects. I fail at them all of the time but I’m also trying again or changing it a little and trying it again.
“Perfect is the enemy of the good.” – Voltaire