LibraryPatternsLet Go of PerfectionismI apply the same exacting standard to a quick interna…
Problem
Toward Craftsmanship

I apply the same exacting standard to a quick internal email as I do to a public report. The standard does not scale with context and I am exhausting myself and my team with inappropriately high bars.

Part of the pattern: Let Go of Perfectionism
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How Aurelius might see it
One way to read this — take what fits, leave what doesn’t.
The real problem isn't your standards — it's that you're using one ruler for every job. A quick internal email and a public report aren't the same job. Treating them the same doesn't make you thorough; it makes you inefficient and it drains the people around you.
The short answer
Not every piece of writing needs your best work. Match the effort to what the writing actually has to do. A quick internal email just needs to be clear and fast. Save your high standard for the work that earns it. That's not lowering the bar — it's placing it in the right spot.
You apply the same exacting standard to a quick internal email as you do to a public report. That's burning fuel you need for the work that actually matters. Research on business email writing shows that context — who you're writing to, and why — shapes what 'good' even means. A message to a colleague two desks away is doing a different job than a report going to clients. The standard should fit the job, not the other way around. Marcus Aurelius put it plainly: 'If it be not fitting, do it not.' He wasn't talking about cutting corners. He was talking about keeping your effort honest to what the moment actually calls for. Pouring full effort into a low-stakes email isn't thoroughness — it's a mismatch. The high bar you're proud of only stays meaningful if you place it where it belongs. This week, before you start any piece of writing, ask one question out loud: 'What does this actually need to do?' If the answer is 'get a quick yes from a teammate,' write one clear paragraph and send it. Reserve your full standard for the work that will be read by people who don't already trust you — public reports, client-facing documents, formal proposals. Start there, and you'll have more energy for the work that earns it.
The path forward
  1. 1Notice the standard mismatch
  2. 2Match the standard to the stakes
  3. 3Save the highest bar for what matters
One thing to try this week
Before your next piece of work this week, ask: what does good enough actually look like for this specific task? Calibrate the standard to the context.
Related problems
A single typo or tiny error can consume me — I will fixate on it long after it is fixed, certain everyone noticed and judged. Trivial mistakes that others would shrug off feel, to me, like glaring proof of carelessness.Accepting good-enough work from myself or my team feels like a concession — a failure to care enough. The identification of good enough with not caring has made adequate work feel like a moral failure.Every sentence I write is edited before the next one appears. I cannot produce a rough draft because editing is embedded in the first pass. The writing is slow and the output is polished from the start but minimal.Every time I get close to my standard, the standard moves higher, so I never actually arrive. What looked like the goal becomes the new baseline the moment I reach it, and I am running on a track that extends itself with every step.Everything has to pass through me before it goes out. I have become the bottleneck in my own organisation because I cannot trust work I have not personally reviewed.I approve something in a meeting and then privately revise it after. The team submits work that has already been signed off. Nobody knows the revision is happening.
Sources
  1. 1. The Role of Clause Activization and Passivization in Business E-mail Writing — Mohammed Al-Badawi; Alalddin Al-Tarawneh, Studies in systems, decision and control (2024)
  2. 2. Politeness in Business Writing: The Effects of Ethnicity and Relating Factors on Email Communication — Mohammad Awad AlAfnan, Open Journal of Modern Linguistics (2014)
  3. 3. Business communication across three European cultures: A contrastive analysis of British, Spanish and Polish email writing — Rosa Giménez Moreno; Hanna Skorczynska, Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) (2013)
  4. 4. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12.13 — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (180)

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