#136: Stop chasing that 'finished my homework' feeling
Do you often have thoughts like, 'I just need to finish X, then I can relax'? Except that when you finish X, you still can't relax, because along comes another obligation - and before you know it, you're face-to-face with burnout. If that's you, you're not alone, and you're not incompetent. You're simply approaching your work in a way that has served you well ever since you were a kid: finish your homework now, play later. That approach is not serving you any more, but it's hard to move on because it's part of your identity. Who even are you, if not the kid who gets their homework done?! There's a way through this muddle, my friend. Join The Academic Imperfectionist for a mindset reset.
Episode transcript:
Forget about it. You’re never going to feel that ever again.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again my friend, it’s great to be back with you. Come on in, make yourself comfortable, let me get the kettle on. Imagine that, eh? Will technology ever advance to the stage where the host of a podcast you’re listening to can make you a cuppa? How would it even work? Maybe you could listen to an ad, and the revenue generated would link to a smart kettle in your home, boiling the water for free, and five minutes later your home robot would bring you your cup of tea? It would probably not work for American listeners, though, because as I’ve acknowledged before, I know you don’t have kettles, and you’re not that into tea anyway. Maybe kettles are on the horizon for you though, what with today’s fast-paced technological progress? We can hope, eh? In the meantime, though, make your own cup of tea - boil the water, microwave it, whatever - and let’s get down to business.
Let me start by asking you a question. Cast your mind back, if you will, to your school days. Were you someone who always got your homework done on time? I bet you were. I bet you were an intolerable swot when you were at school. I bet you not only got your homework done before the deadline, but you got it done with time to spare. You probably went home and did it on the day it was set, and perhaps you went the extra mile, too. No judgement here, by the way. I didn’t miss a single deadline in all the years I spent as a student, which by the way is a considerable number of years. Things have gone a bit tits-up since then, deadline wise, but let’s ignore that for the moment. Swotty prompt-homework-finishers are over-represented among academics. I mean, I don’t know that for sure - as far as I know, nobody has done a proper study - but I’d be willing to bet money on it. I’m not just talking about professional academics, either - I expect postgrads are the same. Who would choose to be a postgrad, after all, unless they like doing homework? Postgrad study is basically full-time homework. There are probably lots of you class swots outside of academia, too. Plenty of non-academic jobs require people to be smart, organised, conscientious, driven, and other things that, according to my hunch, go along with being a prompt finisher of homework.
If you were indeed a speedy homework-finisher - and I’m sure you were, because I bet the audience of this podcast is chock-a-block with them, even if standards have slipped since then (and again, I’ll come back to that in a moment) - if you were someone who was all over your homework the moment it was set, I expect you learned, as a result, to think in a certain way about how you spent your time. I expect that, as a kid, you had thoughts along the lines of, ‘I’ll do my homework first, and then I can relax’, and ‘I’m excited to do that fun thing, but I need to save it until after I’ve finished my homework’, and ‘Best to do my homework now, so it’s out the way’. It was an early lesson in delayed gratification for you, wasn’t it? And, what’s more, I bet you weren’t just diving into your homework and doing a slap-dash job of it, just to be rid of it. Of course not! Schoolteachers, after all, are as disappointed in the kids who carelessly rush their homework as they are in the kids who don’t do it at all, or who hand it in late. You weren’t one of those kids, were you? You took pride in your work, and before you got started on your homework, you’d make sure that your pencils were sharpened and that you’d written the date neatly at the top of the page, and then you’d read the question carefully to make sure you didn’t make any silly mistakes. Not all kids do that, of course. Your teachers were, I expect, pleased with you for the way you approached your work, and over time, I expect that became an important part of your identity. You just weren’t one of those kids who would panic-complete their homework on a Monday morning in the spare five minutes before leaving the house to catch the bus. You were the example that your teachers quietly wished all the other kids would follow.
What happened to that organised, conscientious, capable kid, eh? Wipe that nostalgic tear from your eye, my friend, because if you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Well, that was me, but I couldn’t be more different these days!’, then you’re really not alone. But actually, you’re still that kid. Well, you are and you aren’t. You aren’t in the sense that - as you’re painfully aware - these days you’re drowning in missed deadlines, unfulfilled obligations, and rushed work, whereas the old you would never. The old you was all about timely, careful work. The old you would be horrified at what you’ve become. You’re horrified at what you’ve become. But, at the same time, you’re not so different to that earlier version of yourself. Like that kid, you’re still chasing that ‘finished my homework’ feeling. Finish my homework and then have fun - you still think that’s the way, the gold standard, even if your life these days is basically just a tangle of unfinished and overdue homework, I mean tasks. Like that kid, you think of submitting careful work before the deadline as a virtue. You’ve internalised the approval you got from your teachers when you did what you were supposed to do, and did it well. It’s still part of your identity, even if you struggle to live up to your own standards these days. Those values around getting the work done that were instilled in you as a kid are still there; they’re still important to you, and because of that you’re very hard on yourself when you fail to realise them. Not so for those other kids, though. The ones who submitted rushed work at the last minute. They never had the opportunity to grow dependent on their fix of approval from their teacher. As the years passed, they had plenty of opportunities to learn that they could take a lax approach to homework and still be a good person. They didn’t grow to link their identity with taking their schoolwork seriously.
This background makes your current relationship with your work - and perhaps your life more generally - really difficult. If you’ve ever said to yourself, ‘I just need to finish X, and then I can relax’, then you’re chasing that ‘finished my homework’ feeling that was so defining of you as a child. Once you’ve left school, that’s a completely unattainable feeling. Being required to do homework, as a child, is a completely artificial introduction to what it’s like to have commitments. Homework assignments are carefully curated by schoolteachers to be achievable in the timeframe provided, and just the right balance between being challenging enough to enhance learning yet achievable enough that even the weaker kids can have a go. Teachers communicate with each other to ensure that they’re not collectively overwhelming kids with homework assignments. And, of course, homework tends to be assigned to people who don’t have many other commitments in their lives. Maybe you’re charged with taking out the rubbish once in a while, or setting the table for dinner, but nothing particularly time-consuming or arduous. Being given homework conveys a message of being grown-up - a message of ‘You’re mature enough now to work independently so here’s a thing you need to do on your own without a teacher supervising’ - while at the same time being very much unlike what it’s like to be a grown-up with commitments. Nobody now is managing your workload to ensure that it’s achievable, attainable, and not overwhelming. Nobody now who gives you a deadline is prioritising what you need in order to meet it; they’re too focused on what they need. That ‘finished my homework’ feeling is gone forever. There is no finishing. By the time you finish one task, there’s another one to feel stressed about. Perhaps that’s not a problem for those kids who didn’t wait until their homework is all done before going out to play. But it’s a problem for you, with your conscientious - and maybe a bit neurotic? - approach, which has led you to believe that until you’ve got all your work done, you’re not allowed to play. It’s irresponsible. For you, now, if you ever want to enjoy any down-time at all, you need to learn to be comfortable with claiming it even though there are tasks outstanding. And that means having to un-learn the values that shaped your relationship to your commitments as a child; values that have actually served you very well, because it’s thanks to them that you’ve thrived in your education and achieved some of the great things you’ve achieved so far in your life. Sadly, though, the logic of ‘work now, play when it’s done’ just doesn’t work any more. If you were to try to follow it, you’d never get to play, as you might have found out to your cost if you’ve ever reached the point of burnout.
I know what you’re thinking, at this point. Seriously, you have no idea how predictable you are. (I say that with love, by the way.) You’re thinking: ‘What are you on about? I’m not someone who rushes to get their work done in the hope that I’ll be able to play later! Do you have any idea how much time I spend procrastinating? I barely even make a start on the things I’m meant to be doing until the night before the deadline!’ I can see why these sorts of reflections might lead you to believe that the version of yourself who would get on with their homework the moment they arrived home from school is long gone. But actually, it’s because you’re still that kid - it’s because you still believe in the logic of ‘work now, play later’, and because you’ve internalised the approval you got from teachers when you submitted your work on time - that you struggle so much with your commitments now. Your standards, and your expectations of yourself, are unrealistically high. You are probably painfully familiar with the experience of, the moment you make a start on whatever you’re meant to be doing, realising that there’s no way you’re going to be able to make a flawless job of it and get it done on time and keep up with all the other things you’re meant to be doing. It’s our old friend, perfectionism. It feels like a lose-lose situation. Don’t make a start and miss the deadline, or get started and do a shoddy job. You can’t see a way to exercise the conscientiousness and pride in your work that defines you, that got you where you are today, and without which - you fear - you’ll come crashing down. You can’t see a way to have a satisfying relationship with your work. It all needs to slow down, otherwise you can’t do a good job, but of course the demands just keep on coming. What a nightmare.
If this is you, what can you do? Is it even possible to get to a place where you can feel satisfied, at peace, and secure in the knowledge that you’re doing a good job while also accepting that you can never tick everything off the list? Yes, friend, it is. Let me give you some suggestions about how you can start to feel your way into a better place.
First, you need to stop chasing that ‘finished my homework’ feeling. Just forget it. That feeling belongs to another world - a cartoon world in which you only ever have a very small number of obligations, and they’re ones that have been carefully chosen for you to be matched to your level of skill and experience, realistically achievable in the timescale set, and intended to fit into those moments you have available in between school, bed, and eating your dinner. None of the obligations you have now are like that, any more than the spouse you have now is like the fairy princesses or handsome princes you used to like reading about back then. Next time you say to yourself, ‘I just need to finish X, and then I can relax’ - stop. You’re making yourself miserable. For any X that you finish, there’s a Y lined up to start worrying about.
If you let go of chasing that ‘finished my homework feeling’, though, what then? You’re in freefall, aren’t you? You’re letting go of the last bit of control that you’ve been desperately hanging on to. You need to usher in the chaos. Nothing will ever go to plan ever again. Right? Oh for goodness sake, stop with all the drama. If this is where you find your thoughts going, you’re falling into binary thinking: either it’s possible to reach a stage where every single thing you’re supposed to be doing is finished and where there are no new obligations sneaking onto the list while you’re doing them, OR you give up trying, and it’s mayhem. Try to find the nuance here - the path that involves focusing on the things that are important and de-prioritising the rest. All that stuff that’s buzzing around you - requests, demands, deadlines - can be overwhelming, but it’s not all crucially important. Learn to separate the signal from the noise, which means focusing on the tasks that are connected to the projects that are important to you or to actual moral or professional duties. Not all of the tasks that we find ourselves doing are important. Sometimes, doing the task is less about advancing some important project or discharging some important duty, and more about reassuring ourselves that we are in control, that we’re reliable, that we finish our homework. For example, is it really important that you achieve ‘inbox zero’? I have coaching clients who talk about this, but seriously. Is managing your inbox something that you need to do in order to reach those goals that you care deeply about? Or is it instead something that fulfils an emotional need by helping you feel like you’re an organised person? Sometimes we get hung up on achievable tasks that aren’t actually very important, because at least they give us the satisfaction of completing something. I mean, look at the stuff you do when you’re procrastinating. Tidying your desk, making a cup of coffee, paying a bill, reading a news story, doing a puzzle. Little tasks that you can start and also finish, tasks that you know how to approach. You know they’re a waste of time, but they’re often like getting an emotional massage, and there’s an important lesson for you here. It’s this: just because you can complete a task, it doesn’t mean it’s worth doing. And conversely, just because you have no idea where to even start with a task, doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, or that you’re doing something wrong as you struggle to navigate your way through it. Your yearning to accomplish things - to ‘finish the homework’ - is not a reliable guide to how best to spend your time and energy.
Now, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t be setting yourself goals and targets to achieve. Doing so is important. Just don’t make them ‘finish my homework’ type goals. You’re not going to be finished - or, rather, even when you are finished with one thing, you’re not going to feel finished because now there’s something else. If you can live with that, then you can lean in to your need to strive to accomplish things, and it can help you make progress. Edit that paragraph. Respond to that email. Arrange that seminar. Submit that paper. Apply for that job. And so on. These are all things that, depending on the context, might be important for you to do. So, pick the goals, achieve them, and then - and this bit’s really important - congratulate yourself, even though there is still a load of other stuff to do. This is just what adult life is like. I know you feel like you’re falling behind, and you just want some peace from all the demands, but you’re not really behind. Or, rather, the fact that there’s no escape from the stuff you need to do is not because you’re incompetent or slow or careless - it’s because of the environment you’re in. You’re going to die with an unfinished task list, no matter how efficient you are. The most important thing you can do for your peace of mind, at this stage, is not to clear the list, but to filter it, and ensure you’re spending your limited time and energy in the right places.
If you’re thinking that this reframing of your relationship to your obligations sounds like a huge challenge, I sympathise. You’re viewing things as you’ve always been taught to view them - and of course you don’t want to let yourself off the hook. Heaven forbid. To think clearly about all this, you might find it helpful to step outside your own perspective. Instead of thinking about how you should change your current approach, think instead about what advice you’d give to your past self - that studious child who did their homework, who realised that good things happen when they work now and play later, and who carried that attitude with them through life, accumulating impressive things as they went, until they arrived at where you are now. If you wanted to prepare that version of yourself for what’s to come, for a world where it’s not always going to be possible to finish their homework, what would you say? How would you have them talk to themself when they’re struggling - through no fault of their own - to keep up with everything? What would you have them prioritise? How would you help them find a way to take time for themself even when there’s work still to be done? Perhaps you’re a parent of a young homework-finisher, in which case you can actually have this conversation, and perhaps you’ll both draw value from it.
Let me leave you with one final thought. Have a think about what you might currently be postponing until that fantasy day when you finally finish everything you’re meant to be doing. I’ve convinced you, I hope, that you need to get comfortable with doing those things even while there’s work still to do, otherwise you’re just not going to do them. Is there one of those things that you can do today? Right now? If there is, I’d love to hear about it. Let me know - via my website, Bluesky, Facebook, or Medium. Speak soon.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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