Site icon Christopher Watkin

Research hacks #8: How to know when “good enough” is good enough in academic writing

It is a given that in academia you don’t have enough time to make everything you do as good as it possibly could be. How should you deal with that? You should know when “good enough” is good enough, stop, and move on to the next thing. You should…

Knowing when your work is good enough to submit is often a case of mistrusting the inner voice that incessantly whispers “just”: I “just” need to read one more book; I “just” need to make one more point; I “just” need to give my article one more read-through. An extra hour’s work probably would improve your piece, but only marginally, and it would be an hour you can’t spend on another project that risks never seeing the light of day because of your addiction to pushing for that extra 0.5% increase in quality.

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Many (most?) academics are perfectionists, and if you have that streak you will likely recoil in horror at the very thought of submitting something that is not 100% as you would want it. But here’s the hard truth: if you listen to that siren voice of perfectionism you won’t publish enough to get noticed in the first place, and you will risk over-engineering your writing, losing its sense of vigour and subjecting it to death by a thousand cuts. It’s not worth it.

Try reverse engineering your decision-making. Would you sacrifice article C or postpone it for a year in order to make articles A and B a bit better? If you would, then — great — go ahead and sink further time into those two articles. Oftentimes, however, the answer will be “no way, I’d rather have three”.

So, as a general rule, let your “good enough” be good enough. As with all general rules, however, this one comes with caveats. Here they are:

Your time is precious. Guard it by refusing to sink endless hours into marginal gains that will be invisible to your readers and won’t serve any purpose apart from indulging your own sense of perfectionist satisfaction. Stop and think: will reading that extra book, adding that extra paragraph or making those extra cosmetic edits be a better way of spending time than working on something else? If the answer is “no”, then stop.

How do you decide when more time spent on a project begins to yield insignificant gains?
CC Image courtesy of Zachary Esni on Flickr.

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