When should you do a half-assed job? It’s an important question. I fully support doing high-quality work when such effort is truly required, but not every task requires high-quality work.
For your freelance writing you need to a really good job. Your paying clients expect it, and you must expect it of yourself when you’re creating your own information products.
But there are times when a half-assed effort is not only good enough, but what you should do…
Why You Should Do a Half-Assed Job
Simple — do a half-assed job when it’s all that’s required to get the result you need.
Here’s how it helps you: You save time and energy for more important activities that can increase your income or boost your health or happiness.
My Half-Ass Job Examples
That Lower Division Speech Class My Senior Year at UC Davis…
The group communication class I took at Shasta Community College? My counselor there (a former P.E. teacher) said it would transfer to the University of California system. It didn’t.
So I found myself having to take Speech as a senior, a senior biochem major very busy trying to get A’s and do quality research in Professor Marilynn Etzler’s lab. I was not happy.
So what did I do? First, I took the class pass/no pass to minimize pressure and the threat to my GPA. Second, I did zero work outside of class. I made up my speeches in my head as I road my bike to school (did I mention it was an 8 a.m. class?) and just winged ’em. Didn’t study for the tests at all. Wound up with a C+. Pass!
Learning German While Hitchhiking Through Europe…
I spent two years living in Europe: 9 months doing biochemistry research at the University of Lund in Sweden, and 15 months traveling in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Mostly I traveled by thumb, and a lot of that travel was in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. So I taught myself German using a book and the generous help of the many folks who picked me up.
My German didn’t need to be perfect. I just needed enough to get by, especially to ask for directions and help, and deal with food, lodging (often under a bridge or in a park), and the like. I was fine making grammar mistakes, as long as I was understood.
And German helped me in many situations in many other countries as well, situations where the only language I had in common with someone was German.
Cleaning…
My philosophy: spend 30 minutes getting the house 95% clean is a lot better than spending three hours to get it 99.5% clean. Quick dust, sweep, vacuum and you’re good to go. Who could possibly argue with that?
In Summary, Sometimes It’s OK to Do a Half-Assed Job
It’s often far better than doing nothing at all.
And Now Your Take…
Do you agree? In what circumstances do you do a half-assed job? Leave a comment below…
I need more of these half-assed projects, John 🙂 It’s true, though, being able to prioritize is the first step in managing your time effectively. With blogging in particular, it seems that a lot of people (I have been guilty, too) spend too much time on design and layout and not enough time on writing quality content.
Roy, there’s a balance in many things between getting a high enough level of quality and also just getting the damned thing done.
Regarding blogs, I’ve been guilty of sliding a bit on blog design and layout and focusing more on producing lots of good content. (That’s the case with my Northern California Hiking Trails blog, for instance; but it’s getting a professional redesign this week.)
But blog design and blog writing are instances where I don’t want to do a half-assed job.
You make a good point with perfect examples when you argue for doing a half-assed job. I see “half-assed” as 50% effort for 50% outcome. Nothing wrong with it, and as you discuss, sometimes it’s the only efficient way to go.
Then there’s the “80/20” rule which states that you get 80 percent outcome for only 20% effort, which is not a bad deal at all. And following your house cleaning example, why do the extra 80% of effort just to get a possible 20% more outcome? It’s typically not worth it. The trick is to know when to go all out and when to be half-assed or 80/20.
Absolutely right Eric. This post is actually a variation on the Pareto principle/80-20 rule.
And the crucial point is knowing when to put forth the minimal effort, and figuring out that the minimal effort will get you the desired return.
hmmmm…not sure about your 1/2 ass cleaning example. Sure, that’ll work when you have a partner that will pick up the slack!
But what if I did a half-assed cleaning job once a week, rather than a full-assed job once a month?
1/2 ass is 1/2 ass…whether it’s cleaning, being in a relationship, taking care of your health, etc…it’s annoying when it effects other people.
But not as annoying if the other people affected agree lol
I had another thought about “half-assed.” When people see the word, they think of it as “bad.” So, a “half-assed” job is a “bad” job. I know you titled your column with “half-assed” to get attention, but is negative attention a good thing?
Eric, I see your point and I definitely thought about that. Half-assed means substandard, and my point here is that it’s best to do some things at a substandard level rather than not do them at all.
And as far as the title, I chose that because I think it will intrigue people and get them to come over here and read about it. I’ve posted that title on Twitter, and it shows on other blogs I comment on (blogs that use CommentLuv, that is).
Hi John,
I agree with you that it is better to focus on doing important jobs rather than do things that have no huge no or little value. Thanks for sharing
John, I beg to differ. My personal approach to “jobs” is to do them well or not at all, regardless whether the job is large or small. Otherwise, why waste time. As to your Pass/Fail example, you wanted to pass. You did. That’s 100% even if it didn’t take much effort on your part. As to your “clean the house” example, I just gotta say, I don’t know what world you live in but I do not believe you can get any house 95% clean in 30 minutes. We need to define the terms here. A “clean” house to you would probably not be a “clean house” to others. It takes me 30 minutes just to tidy up my kitchen alone, and we’re talking maybe 50% clean.
Nancy, for me it’s about figuring out what can be done with minimal effort that will have a big payoff, and especially those tasks that most people shy away from doing entirely if they can’t do it well.
Learning some German, for example. Many people are scared to speak a foreign language because they 1) don’t want to sound stupid if/when they speak it poorly, and 2) don’t want to put the time into learning the language. My “half-ass” German didn’t take much time to learn, and I spoke it poorly, yet was still understood and able to travel where and how I wanted with relative ease.
Cleaning the house. Of course, this is situational. You have a large house with many pieces of furniture and other objects. Stephanie and I have a modest size house with minimal furniture. My 30-minute cleaning doesn’t include the kitchen. (I wipe down the counters and appliances when I do the dishes.) It does include: straightening/picking up, shaking out the rugs, sweeping the floors, vacuuming the entire house, cleaning one bathroom. Granted, I don’t vacuum under or behind the couch during these 30-minute sessions, but the place looks clean and presentable.
I think Eric’s right here. ‘Half assed’ would tend to infer 2nd rate, which is not what you’re suggesting.
But, I whole heartedly agree with your sentiment. I see it all the time. People aiming for perfection, whether that’s an eBook or a software product, 80% complete may well be good enough. Although if you were in the business of making jumbo jets, I would suggest 80% is no where near enough!
I’m a big advocate of 80:20. Personally I’m looking at personal outsourcing so that I can become more productive or at least have more time to focus on growing my business to the next level.
Matthew, what I’m saying has some similarities with the 80-20 rule, but it’s not the same.
I’m saying that there are times when we should do something poorly because it’s better than doing nothing at all.
Another example: washing the car.
I drive on dirt road a lot in the summer and a lot of dirt coats my Subaru Outback, including the windows. The dirty windows can be a driving hazard since they can make it hard to see. If I’m pressed for time, I can hose down my entire car in about one minute and remove 98% of the dirt from the windows and body. It’s safer and the car looks cleaner.
However, if my attitude is do the job very well or don’t do it all, and I don’t have the time to the job very well, then my car windows are still just as dirty — and just as hazardous.
John,
In the above example of washing your car, if you intend to hose it down in one minute to just get the dust off the windows, and you indeed do that, then you have done a good job. That is, you adequately did what you intended to do. However, if you hosed it down in 30 seconds and left a bunch of caked dirt on your windshield, then you did a half-assed job.
On the other hand, if you intended to wash your car completely, but instead merely rinsed off the dirt, then you did a half-assed job. Savvy?
I appreciate every body taking me to task about this, I really do.
I think semantics is at the root of our disagreements. I’m using the term “half-assed job” to refer to what a neutral observer would say if he saw what I did but did not know my reasoning for doing only what I did.
“That guy sure did a half-assed job washin’ his car.”
I agree that semantics is a problem here, especially since “half-assed” has such a negative connotation. But your examples don’t illustrate the point I think you’re trying to make. Case in point, the pass/fail example and the car wash example. If you wanted an A and you got a C, that’s a half-assed job regardless of how hard you worked for it. If you wanted a clean car and you just hosed off the windows, that’s a half-assed job. If you just wanted a C, it’s not half-assed. If you just wanted clean windows and forget about the rest of the car, it’s not half-assed. What someone else might think is only important if you care, in which case, you might want to do the job well after all. Even your German example – if all you wanted to do is to speak a little German and you don’t care that your accent’s bad or whatever, then it’s not half-assed. You did what you wanted to do. Goal achieved, 100%, for you.
Yes, “half-assed” does have a negative connotation, and too many people are too focused on always doing things according to others’ expectations.
What looks like a “half-assed job” to one person could be the precise outcome the doer wants, as you point out.
I think people are getting hung up on the term “half-assed.”
My main point: we’ll have better time management skills/intelligent productivity if we’re willing to look at how we can get our desired outcomes for the least amount of effort, even if others would think we did a half-assed job, and that we shouldn’t care if someone thinks we didn’t prepare very well for a speech, or that are car should be cleaner.
Note to readers: Eric Soares is my older brother, Nancy Soares is his lovely and talented wife, and Stephanie Hoffman is my partner and the love of life.
So they all know me well, and they all have personal experience with what I’m sure they consider to be my half-assed jobs.
Good idea….was just telling my patner the same thing that one have to concentrate on what’s important and not give 100% of your time when not much is required by your client.
Yeah, there’s that time that you have to half-assed it John.
Hi John. I am always hesitant, and scared to do a half-assed job because I worry that it would carry over to “getting used to it”. Because of this, I am a bit OCD about everything.
Brandon, the key is knowing when to give a small effort (= just the right amount of effort) to get the result that you want. The key is give the necessary effort for what’s required.
Right now I have about ten freelance writing projects for college textbook publishers. Believe me, they are getting my best effort because that’s what the work requires.
What’s most amusing is that sometimes, when you give up fighting for something perfect and do what you figure is “half-assing” it, you end up doing a great job.
I find this alot with blog posts – I’ll be obsessed with writing some kind of masterpiece, end up just throwing out an edited piece of stream of consciousness, and it’ll be a hit. And on the flip side, something I spend eons and eons on gets little reception.
So, unless you’re in the medical field, try half-assing it and seeing how it goes. The results may surprise you!
Kristi, I’ve had the exact same thing happen with my blog posts. I get in a “I’m just gonna get it done and get it out there” mode, and then I’m surprised at the high quality of the result.
It’s a bit of a tangent, but often just relaxing and giving ourselves permission to do something badly results in actually doing it quite well. It’s about not being afraid of failure.
And I’d also add the engineering field as another one where half-assing it is not a good idea.
Guess what? DoAHalfAssedJob.com is available.
Kristi, often I find the difference a year later. The pieces I sweat over tend to hold their value over time, regardless of their initial reception.
John, I like the term “half-assed” in your post. You seem to be saying, “When should you not bother to go the extra mile?” or “When is a so-so job good enough?”
Once I was moving out of an office that I knew was going to be totally remodeled as soon as we left. So when it came to cleaning up, we just did a basic functional sweep of the place. We knew they’d be tearing it all apart anyway.
Or sometimes I’ll need to get something straightened up but I don’t have the time to really get into it. I do have some time though, so I’ll improve it from “whole-assed” to “half-assed” shape and finish the rest later.
I’ve seen people really shoot themselves in the foot by going over things with a fine-tooth comb out of an obsessive need to get it just so, but then miss the big picture and not have time to do the important stuff.
Another little example of this would be my advice to people taking a test, particularly a fairly long multiple choice test. I recommend going over the whole test lightly and just answering the questions you are very sure about. This would be a casual half-assed job is that’s all you did. But, after that first go through, where you get all the ones you know cold, then you go through and look at the rest. Any question that you get really stumped on, you skip. Any questions that will yield to a few minutes of thought, you do those next. And finally, when your time is running out, you try the really tough ones and at least take a guess at those. And maybe leave five minutes for a quick read through of all your answers to be sure you didn’t just misplace one.
This is sort of a metaphor for prioritizing for me. Nail the easy stuff first, then the mid-level difficult stuff, and then the hard stuff you’ll probably mess up on anyway. Doesn’t apply everywhere of course, sometimes the hard stuff is fundamental or more pressing, but a lot of times, it pays to do things this way. Like do a rough cleaning and organizing of the whole space, then start to fine tune and do more cosmetic stuff.
When it comes to my blog and posts in general, I have a real aversion to anything half-assed. I just can’t bring myself to post anything I haven’t gone over at least once and that goes for facebook posts too. I just can’t do those lower case, grammar-less, misspelled, acronym ridden things. I care about words and communication too much and I like to be sure my words are saying what I want them to say. That said, I do get faster at this the more I practice and I’m big on saving drafts and reviewing them later if I’m running out of time.
I like the general drift of your focus here, which is on the results of your actions. How much energy and time do you budget for the tasks at hand in order to achieve the results you want. I think just focusing on the results you’re getting with the way you do things now is a great teacher. I have found that a lot of people just aren’t result oriented. They really don’t want what they say they want. They’ve got some other hidden agenda, like a rescue fantasy or something like that.
People say to me all the time, “You’re so organized!”, like it’s some inherent trait of my being, like, “You’re so tall!”. I always tell them that I was never organized until I really understood the results I was getting being disorganized. Once I began to be committed to better results, organizing my flows just became an obvious, natural way to do it. This is why I so recommend that people really be clear about what their actual mission in life is. Because if your mission in life is to prove that your parents screwed you up by failing at everything you try, all the tips in the world aren’t going to help. You have to actually want the results you claim to be after. And every teacher knows, it’s a pleasure to teach someone who wants to learn, and a drag to teach someone who doesn’t. So some self-examination on this issue can be very productive and clearing. Of course you have to want to be clearer to do the examining… ;~)
Gene, you give a lot of good examples of when to do a half-assed job, when not to, and how to get clear on what’s important and what needs to get done to achieve the important.
It really is being clear about what you want to get from a situation and how much effort you’re willing to put into it, and then making sure you come through at the sufficient level.
And regarding being organized, organization is of great importance to me. That’s one area I never half-ass it. (OK, hardly ever)
I used to avoid half assed work to the point of exhaustion. I’ve personally found minimalism to be the solution for me.
Just don’t do the unimportant half.
If ONLY I can do a half-assed job more often…life would be much more simpler. Must be my type-A personality because it’s difficult for me to take shortcuts EVEN when I know I could definitely get away with it and produce the same results.
Need to work on that since I know I can probably be more productive if I focus Full-Assed on the projects that really matter and Half-Assed on the ones that don’t. =)
Thanks for your share John…fun and informative post!
Michele, you’ve nailed it! We must know when to do a full-assed job and when to do a half-assed job.
It’s interesting that some people do full-ass jobs when only a half-assed job is called for, and others pretty much always do a half-assed job on everything. We need to know when to which.
All I know is that there is a lot of ass-jobs going on around here…
One of the most pernicious myths is an old chestnut I was raised with: “If a job is worth starting, it’s worth finishing.”
The problem is it’s very difficult to know in advance if a job is worth starting… before you get started!
John, I may have to ask your opinion on what I should be half-assing right now. Can’t go flat out on everything!
Yeah, just because we start something doesn’t mean we have to finish it. Often the smartest choice is “creative abandonment.”
I came across your website. I am a university instructor. I am sick and tired of
everyone around me who has this attitude. Students do a half-assed job. Professors do a half-assed job.
Staff members do a half-assed job. No one cares to do a really really good job.
Let’s do a good f* job — not a half-assed job.
Eungi, I’m not sure how carefully you read my post. Many tasks require full attention and high-quality work. Others are not as important, and doing a half-assed job frees up time for the important things.