This weekend during a morning run, I was listening to the Sparks podcast edition of Tim Cavey‘s blog post Here is Your Permission to Stop Doing So Much and it hit home just like I knew it would after simply reading the title. I love how he constantly came back to “until the work is done” which was almost laughable from the beginning, because we all know the work is never done. Yet, we continuously strive to get there.

…If I just put it one more hour of work tonight, maybe tomorrow will go more smoothly.

…If I just check these last few unapproved posts on Seesaw before I head to bed, I’ll be in better shape to start the day on the right foot tomorrow.

…If I just check my e-mail, I’ll have a better idea how how my week is shaping up.

…If I just quickly look at the Teams instant message that came in while writing this post, or the parent e-mail I just received… (the struggle is real y’all…. seriously!!!)

…If I just…

It all adds up. It really does.

And as much as we know that the work is never done, it seems as though we always try to scratch off all of items on our to do list. It’s simply impossible. We have to stop trying. We have to be okay with not done. And we have to be okay with not perfect.

Sometimes, good enough is enough.

And perhaps striving for perfection might just be what is holding us back, which brought me back to a post I wrote in 2017 after my son broke his arm: Is Perfection Paralyzing You?

What would happen if we embraced the fact that we’ll never be done? What if we gave ourselves permission to do what we can within the hours that we set and the rest just has to wait or get dropped altogether? What if we truly allowed ourselves to do our best and to embrace the “this isn’t perfect but it’s good enough” mentality? What if we celebrated doing things without them being perfect because we understood that growth lies there?

I wonder if we’d be ever better for it…