Halfassedness

I've decided this morning that a goal for myself this year is to embrace halfassedness.  As a hyper-conscientious person, this is something that does not come naturally, but that is nevertheless a useful quality to have.  I think most of my readers are well-versed in halfassedness and have experienced its benefits in their lives.

My usual method of cleaning the apartment is to do so from top to bottom (i.e., cleaning high surfaces down to cleaning the floors) and to do a pretty thorough job (of the things I am willing to do -- some things I just don't ever do or do very rarely as part of a "big clean" project).  But I haven't had the energy since getting sick last week to do this, and the apartment floors especially were looking pretty ratty and annoying me.  So this morning I wiped down the counters in the kitchen and vacuumed all the floors, stopping short of mopping the bathrooms or upstairs.  This is the amount that I had the energy/will to do.  And even though it's far from completely cleaned, the apartment does look better and I feel better about it -- both because the apartment is cleaner and because I have done enough that I no longer feel the huge task "clean the apartment" hanging over me.  It was strange but nice to do a halfassed job of cleaning the apartment.

I also had some shoes I wanted to clean so I could wear them today, so I cleaned them and then on the spur of the moment did a halfassed job of polishing (just using leather lotion and a cloth) half a dozen of my pairs of shoes and three of Robert's (that have taken a beating because he wears his nice leather shoes to work and walks across the slushy/salty/etc. parking lot).  I could have done a much better job, but I think this halfassed approach got me about 80% of the way there.  (Note: I also had the realization that the fact that I hate how Robert's shoes get salty around the edges because he wears them on the parking lot is my problem that has a very easy solution that does not involve me trying to convince him to change his behavior, which is both unlikely to work and is objectively unreasonable and annoying.)

Other areas I want to try being more halfassed about:
*Exercising
*Looking for a job
*Writing on this blog
*Keeping in touch with people

Doing these things to a consistently very high standard is exhausting, and having a standard you don't feel up to meeting results in not doing them at all -- both of these outcomes are not good and both feel stressful (in different ways). 

Psychologists conceptualize a lot of things in terms of an inverted U function -- that the outcome is better at moderate levels than at either extreme.  Most famously, the relationship between arousal (stress) and performance is described as an inverted U -- people perform best under moderate stress.  (This is something that probably makes intuitive sense to you and that you've experienced for yourself -- or observed in other people you know.  The person who is so stressed, they freak out; the person who is so unworried, they just don't do anything.)

Image from Psychlopedia

Instead of thinking of stress as the causal variable, I'm concerned for myself right now with my stress level (especially my experience of feeling stressed) as an outcome variable.  (Of course, I am also concerned with performance, but I am actually trying to get away from being as obsessed with and self-identified with performance as I've been in the past.)  I'm wondering whether (hoping that) being more halfassed about things will improve my feeling of stress, while maintaining a level of performance that is adequate.

The whole "satisicing vs. maximizing" discussion in psychology and economics circles is also relevant here, I think.  The classic domain for this idea is in decision-making -- the idea that some people/people in some situations will put in a lot of effort to arrive at an optimal decision (e.g., researching all available blenders to find the blender with the best set of features for the price) while other people/people in other situations will use heuristics/rules of thumb to arrive at a "good enough" decision" (e.g., going to a store and picking a blender that looks fine and is from a reputable seeming brand). One of the findings of this line of research is that satisficers are happier than maximizers and experience less regret over their decisions.

And there are approximately 8,000 other theories that are consistent with this general idea that less can be more.

So yeah...it's not like I've developed some amazing rare insight into anything.  It's more that I actually feel like applying these things to my own life...though I am going to do that in a halfassed way as well.  I have no master plan for becoming a more halfassed person.

My normal approach to writing a blog post like this would have been to think about it more and wait until I felt I had the time/energy to write about my ideas more completely....which leads to not writing the post at all 90% of the time.  I was thinking about this halfassedness idea while vacuuming the floor upstairs, and I decided to sit down and write the post as soon as I finished with that task.  So in the spirit of halfassedness, I offer you this halfassed blog post on the topic.