Wholeheartedly Half-assing

And other ways I make it look like I have my life together

I hate cleaning bathroom mirrors. Especially with kids. They’re always splotchy, I’m too short to reach the top, and they just get dirty again. So for a long time, I just… never cleaned them at all. Who needs to see when brushing teeth or hair anyway? Who needs a clean surface when applying makeup?

Not me, I decided.

Eventually, all those little splotches wore on me. It was subconscious, at first, then noticeable as I tried and failed at putting on my eyeliner. Then embarrassing enough I wondered what guests thought when they went to wash their hands. I decided maybe mirror-cleaning needed to be on my list of chores after all.

But how? I didn’t like cleaning mirrors, and getting them spotless and streak-free takes a lot of time. I thought about the supplies I would need, the climbing on counters I’d have to do to reach the top. How long it could take to squeegee mirrors into some kind of reflective perfection. The last thing I wanted was to waste a bunch of my week cleaning the three mirrors in my house.

My answer was half-assing it.

All I had to do to count the chore as “done” was leave the mirrors better than I found them. I didn’t have to remove every spot, or every streak. Not even most of them. I could spray the Windex, run a paper towel over it for 20 seconds, miss half the mirror, and still call it done, because it was better.

It took about a month and a half before I realized my mirrors were suddenly always mostly clean instead of almost always very dirty. If I missed the left half of the mirror last week, it’s the left half I do first this week. Same with spots that didn’t come off the first time, or residue streaks because really paper towels aren’t the recommended mirror-cleaning products.

Wholeheartedly half-assing broke down my Wall of Awful until it was more like a Sidewalk Curb of Awful. And once I realized my mirrors were getting cleaned regularly, I started applying this principle elsewhere, too. If I do a few dishes, I win. If I mop up that one stain from the cat puke but miss the whole dining room floor, I win.

At work, too, sometimes I lean in to half-assing. If I choose a template for my next social media post, I win. If I type out a Medium draft with a bunch of [insert better content here] fillers, I win. I won’t publish them like that, of course, but I find that approaching projects in layers — as small of layers as possible — and letting each one be incomplete on its own makes the whole thing less daunting.

I’ve written before that inconsistency is what makes me consistent, but it works in reverse, too: consistency is what allows me the freedom to be inconsistent. I’ve struggled with perfectionism, and the paralysis it can cause, my whole life. Letting go of that — and teasing myself by calling my efforts half-assing — has made me unrecognizable from who I was.

And hey, now I can even see her in the mirror.

Key Message: Letting go of perfection gets you closer to perfect than if you never start.