4.36 How do I know if my work is good enough

“Is my work good enough” is the million dollar question running through most PhD students’ (and many academics’) mind! In a sector famous for high, yet very poorly defined, standards, it’s no wonder many of us spend a lot of time worrying about whether our work is good enough. In this episode, I chat about why this concern is totally understandable (spoiler - it’s not your fault!) and why it can also be so debilitating. I suggest instead that you ask yourself “good enough for what specifically”. I’ll give you a few options to consider and some pitfalls to avoid when learning how to decide for yourself when something is good enough. 

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on what to do when you get contradictory advice. 

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. And I'm not gonna lie, when I was just this morning thinking I need to record podcast today and I hadn't decided what I was going to be talking about. I did have a plan before, but it was an interview with somebody, which is coming up hopefully, but they had to reschedule the interview, so we haven't got it recorded yet. It's gonna be really, really good. So any of you who have children particularly might be interested in that one when it comes, but it's not gonna be ready for this session. So I was like, right, I need a topic. What am I gonna do? Not sure, but thankfully my gorgeous members came to the rescue. I had a coaching session this morning with my members and one of them, we had such a good chat that I said to her during the session. I was like, Ooh, I think you've just fixed my problem for what to talk about in the podcast. And that is how do I know if my work is good enough? And I am sure that you have clicked on this either 'cause you listen every week and which goes, I love you and thank you and stick a review on Apple and all those places.

Or because you have asked yourself this before, how do I know if my work is good enough? And what I've often seen, not just from this client today, but from other people I've worked with in the past is quite how challenging a question that can be and how problematic it can be when we think we dunno the answer to it.

So what I'm gonna think about today is why it's hard to know whether our work is good enough, what problem it creates when we don't know if it's good enough. And importantly, what I think you should do instead. So let's go.

So I always like to start with compassion. You guys know that by now and this is no different. It is totally understandable that you have no idea what counts as good enough. It is totally understandable that it feels as though there's kind of hidden expectations, vague standards, hard to pin down qualities, all these things.

There is. This isn't you being stupid, this isn't you not understanding academia, although it does build a little as you kind of get more familiar. But even for people who are super familiar in academia, it is really, really hard to pin down. I've had articles published that I didn't think were gonna get accepted. I've had articles rejected that I thought were much better than those other articles. It's really hard, and I've had the same grants as well, by the way. Um, it's really hard to know whether what you're doing is good enough or not, and it's very, very normal not to have a clear conception of that in your head.

There are things that can help. We can get better at judging as we gain more experience, as we gain more familiarity with the field, as we get more confident in being able to declare something as good enough, but it is a vague and fluffy concept that is quite hard to pin down.

Now that said, just because it's understandable that you feel this way, it doesn't mean that you don't get negative consequences of thinking of this. And again, I see this all the time with my clients and members, is that when we are not sure whether something's good enough, we get overwhelmed at how much there is still left to do.

We have a tendency often to carry on working on a piece of work way longer than it perhaps needs, or more slowly or focusing on the wrong things. We often have a tendency to include too much that any of you who have ever worried about whether a presentation, for example, is good enough or not.

There's a tendency to put more and more in, in a way that doesn't necessarily make it a better presentation. And finally, it also makes it less likely that you'll submit it either for comments or for publications or conferences or whatever. So we often end up missing opportunities, either missing opportunities for feedback or missing opportunities to present our thoughts and ideas.

So whilst it's really understandable that you find it very hard to judge whether your work is good enough or not. Not being able to, or believing that you can't, and believing that you should be able to, can be really, really debilitating. Okay? Notice I didn't say you need to know whether it's good enough or not.

It's believing that you can't tell and believing that you have to be able to tell. that is debilitating. Okay. Slightly different. I want you to notice the nuance there.

So what do we do when we're in this position? We go, I just dunno if it's good enough. My first question for you, and this is the question that I asked the client in the coaching session today, and she sort of looked at me as though she'd never thought about it quite like this before, which is understandable.

Most of you won't have, which is good enough for what? Because when you start digging into that, then you realize that either people don't really have an answer. It's just this vague notion of good enough, and in fact, when pushed, most people's definition of good enough is I couldn't make it any better.

That's the most common definition of good enough that I've seen. I think that's a deeply d problematic definition. I haven't got a publication that I couldn't make somewhat better, I don't think. Would they be meaningfully better? Probably not. Could I make them better? Yeah. Defo. I make parts of it clearer. Explain my point more thoroughly. Do some more extensive analysis. Course I could. A hundred percent. So could any other paper out there.

So if our only definition of good enough is as good as I could possibly get it, I'm afraid I've got bad news for you. Your thesis is not going to be as good as it could be if you spent two more years on it. Your next grant application is not going to be as good as it could be. If you are working on it full-time with no other academic responsibilities, that review your writing is not going to be as good as it could be, if you spend another five years working on it and you didn't have to collect any other data, it's not going to be.

That's totally appropriate because we can't do everything we do to the best of our abilities because our abilities are spread between different things. So if your only definition of is it good enough is, is it as good as I can possibly make it, we're boxing ourselves into a no win situation.

So what I want you to think through, and I'm gonna give you some examples of what I mean when I say good enough for what, and I want you to ask yourself, which of these is true for me?

So as you are listening, I want you to think of a piece of work that you are worrying that whether it's good enough or not. And I want you to try and put it into one of these categories or come up with your own if you think you come up with others. I love that.

In fact, you can message me, so if you're not on my newsletter already, make sure you've signed up for my newsletter. Email me if you've come up with another version of this, but I'm gonna give you a bunch of them that I think might help. So when we ask ourselves good enough for what first option, good enough to park for now.

Sometimes there are pieces of work or tasks that need doing well enough that I can leave it alone for a while. So as an example, this might be if you are getting going on a lit review, that ultimately will be in your thesis. But that you're not finalizing your thesis for another three years, but you need to have done some of it now. It needs to be good enough that you know enough to get on to do the next bit, and it's good enough to put in a box somewhere and leave until two years time when you might update it, for example. So things that are good enough, you know, we are there or thereabouts. I can leave it over there until it becomes a priority or until it needs updating or whatever. So good enough to park for now.

The next one I think is good enough to take the next step, 'cause often what I see is people want to get their articles. For example, whether you're a PhD student or an academic, they wanna get their articles to as close as humanly possible to a publishable article as possible before they ask for any feedback or support from anybody.

And that might be exacerbated if your supervisor asks for polished drafts. Remember my episode from a few weeks back. If you haven't listened to that, make sure you check out that one. Why I think you shouldn't wait for polished drafts, or if you are an academic who doesn't have a supervisor, particularly, it can be a bit awkward to ask for feedback on something sooner than that, but actually what we wanna get to is a draft or a plan is good enough for me to take the next step. And if the next step is to seek feedback on a particular element of it, how good does it need to be in order to provide enough information for that next step to happen? So if you want somebody to give you feedback on the structure, for example.

Does this feel like it's presented in a logical order? For example, how good does it need to be in order for them to do that? It doesn't have to be elegantly written. It doesn't have to have every example that you're going to use clearly spelled out in it. But it does need to have a structure in place.

It does need to have an attempt to, at a logical flow so that somebody can then say whether they think it is reaching a logical flow or not. So the next option here is, is it good enough for the next step to happen? And most of the time that is gonna be the one that you go for. I actually think that one is even true when it comes to submitting your thesis or submitting articles or submitting grants. 'cause actually, with all of those things, there are usually particularly articles and thesises, there are usually further steps after that submission. IE someone else is gonna read it and give you some comments and an opportunity to change things. So even then, is it good enough for that next step?

The next question that I think is related to that and will help you answer that is, is it good enough to serve its purpose? So again, with articles we often tell ourselves they have to be amazing, they have to be perfect, they have to be as good as I can possibly do. They don't, they have to serve a purpose sometimes that that is to present data clearly that you have collected. Sometimes it might be to present an argument that is maybe less data based and more theoretical, for example. But the job is to present something to the audience that you want to present it to in a way that allows them to use it for the things that they might want to use it for. Notice there good enough is entirely context driven.

Good enough to share with other academics is different, to good enough to share with the press or to share with the general public, for example. So another question. When you're asking yourself, is this good enough? And you ask yourself for what? You ask yourself, what is the purpose here? The purpose is to convey what in a way that is comprehensible and useful to who. And that, again, really narrows down. Your definition of what is good enough.

It is like if you are presenting at a conference, for example, ask yourself what is the purpose of this presentation, because it certainly shouldn't be to share everything I know on this topic. Maybe the purpose of the presentation is to share something interesting that members of our academic community might be interested in, and that could potentially lead to collaborations or that might start interesting discussions, for example, and when you start asking yourself those things then you can really narrow down. It's much easier to narrow the scope. For example, if the purpose is to provide a thought provoking and engaging 15 minutes of content for a conference, rather than to tell them everything I know about topic X.

The fourth one that I came up with is good enough for an objective purpose. So here, good enough to be a PhD, good enough to be accepted into a journal, good enough to get funded, for example. Now I say objective, not necessarily objective though, right? All of these things, whether it's awards, grants, publications, whatever, not that objective. I mean, I love the old peer review system. It's a little bit like democracy. It's as good as anything else we've got, but it's certainly isn't perfect, right? And so this, let's put objective in heavy, heavy speech marks here. Um, but for a kind of concrete purpose, let's say that, and. Again, you then get to ask yourself, okay, what does that actually even mean?

What is good enough for that? For a PhD thesis, genuinely the actual criteria change in different places because it depends sort of what the structure of the rest of your program is, for example. So there is usually less quantity of research. In a North American thesis, for example, because there's been so much taught work, your comprehensive exams and all your modules and all those things, that the final thesis ends up being somewhat shorter usually, or covering a shorter body of work than somebody who's doing a full-time research based phD with no taught component, for example, who ends up doing multiple studies and putting them together like that. And then again, that will differ from somebody doing a professional doctorate. It'll differ from somebody doing a doctorate by publication, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So even this, there isn't a kind of hardcore criteria, and I see variations that even within disciplines, even within your university, within your discipline, even there, it's not very easy to say this is the one that's good enough, that one isn't.

What I think is quite useful is to remember that, especially with PhD submissions, it's a high jump, not a long jump now. I'll tell you what I mean by that. You'll know I love my analogies. With a high jump, there is a certain height on the bar and you have to clear it. You don't get bonus points for going higher. In a long jump, every millimeter more you squeeze out the better. PhD is a high jump. It has to be good enough to meet the criteria for the PhD. You don't go get extra points for clearing that, that wildly higher. Now does it give you advantages in future careers? Probably, yes. Obviously not necessarily, but potentially. But in terms of actually getting your PhD. It's a high jump and usually the criteria will be something around sufficient original work, that provides a contribution to the literature and was conducted by you and therefore understood and presented by you. Okay? It'll be something around that. And reminding yourself, does it mean it has to be your absolutely best version of everything? No, it does not. Does it mean that it has to include everything you ever read, every thought you ever had, everything you intended to do at the beginning?

No. No thesis ever has. It has to hit those. It has to be sufficient, original work makes contribution to the literature and which you conducted and understand yourself. Okay, so you get to remind yourself. We've got to hit those criteria and remember, it has to hit those criteria after your viva, after you've done any changes, not immediately. 

Now, those are the four main kind of standards that I think are there. It's good enough to park to leave alone for now. It's good enough to take me to the next step. It's good enough to serve its purpose, to do the job I want it to do, and it's good enough to hit a sort of concrete target like getting accepted or something like that.

I think the problem that many of you listening have is that you've got two others in your head, that I am gonna give you a little case now as to why I highly recommend you try and ditch them. The first is good enough to avoid criticism. I think many, many, many of you are trying to create your work to a standard that no one can criticize. And I dunno if you guys have ever met any academics. I know you have, but criticizing things is kind of our job. It's kind of what we do, right? I can't imagine there isn't, there isn't a piece of work that nobody criticizes because everybody has different conceptions of what it should have done, what the appropriate research methods are, what the, you know, what underlying ontology and blah, blah, blah else you're using.

Right? There's no research that gets no criticism. Yet many, many, many of you are hoping that if you just work hard enough, the reviewers will have no comments. The examiners will have no changes. Your supervisor will just write back and tell you that you're brilliant and there's no further work needed on it.

And if that's what you are aiming for, I get it right. You're trying to avoid the sort of psychological threat that comes with being criticized. And usually side note, we talked about this in a coaching session, in the same coaching session. Actually, usually the problem is not what criticism you'll receive, it's what you'll make that criticism mean.

Usually what hurts in criticism is not their exact words. It's that when you hear those words, you say, oh yeah, that's true. Oh yeah. I'm always like that. Oh yeah. If that's true, then I'll never finish. I'll never be good enough. I don't fit in. I shouldn't have started, dah, dah, dah. So if you are trying to make a piece of work good enough to avoid any critique. We are fighting a losing battle. That's why this is taking so long. If you are just like, I have no idea how long anything takes, my goals keep slipping. I am not on top of anything. I feel so behind this might be why? 'cause you are trying to make it good enough to avoid critique.

We can't avoid critique.

In fact, there is one way I lie, I lie to you. There is one way you can avoid critique and that's by never sharing your work with anybody. That's how you avoid critique. Trouble is, there's downsides for that, and you're gonna beat yourself up for that too. So let's not do that one. But it's the only way to avoid critique. So if you find yourself trying to get it good enough that your supervisor can't find anything wrong with it, we are fighting a losing battle from the start.

And any of you who have ever written a piece of work, got feedback from your supervisor, changed it based on the feedback from your supervisor, and then they've criticized the bit that they changed. You know what I mean? They'll find something to criticize, even if it was text they wrote. I've done this. Okay. Supervisors, if you are listening, I ain't shouting you out for that. We all understand. We all, you know, we have a go at doing it the best way we can and then when we read it fresh, we change our minds on it. There's no way to avoid getting criticism even if it was something they wrote themselves.

The second thing that I think lots of you are doing is wanting something to be good enough to prove that you are good enough. So we are saying it's not good enough yet. It's not good enough yet. What we really mean is that this thing we're writing is some sort of representation of us. And we are not good enough yet, and that if somebody critiques our work, they're critiquing us.

If somebody has questions about, why didn't you include this, that will mean something about us, that we missed it, that we weren't ambitious enough, that we didn't think of it, and so on. So if you are trying to get your work good enough that you can prove you are good enough as a person, again, we're fighting a losing battle.

We need to get back to, is it good enough for the job it needs to do? We are not gonna try and avoid criticism. We are not gonna try and avoid that sort of sense that we are not good enough. We're not gonna ignore them either, by the way, just as a tangent, we're not gonna ignore those things too. But we're gonna be kind to ourselves.

Most of us try to fix our fear of criticism by avoiding criticism, either by never showing it to anybody or by trying to make it so perfect that no one can criticize it. That's just not how we do it. We don't also have to tell ourselves to man up and get on with it. What we get to do is to tell ourselves if we're getting criticized, and I get disappointed about that.

I get sad about that. That's okay. I'm gonna be really nice to myself. I'm not gonna make it mean loads of things about me. I'm gonna be sympathetic. I'm gonna, you know, allow myself time to feel those feelings. I'm gonna put myself in a warm and cozy supported environment where somebody will gimme a hug. I'm gonna do whatever helps me feel good in that moment. I'm just not going to avoid it by trying to be perfect or not showing it to anyone.

So you might even be saying within, even within those contexts, how do I know if it does the job well enough? How do I know if it is gonna get published or not? The answer here is, we don't I'm afraid. We don't know. But what we get to do is to ask ourselves, well, what would that look like? What, how could I get really, really, really specific and really, really, really objective and say, okay, if I was trying to serve this purpose, what bits might it need and try and evaluate against those as best we can.

So instead of having this generic, oh, I'm just not sure it's good enough, we are saying, I am trying to put across the argument that X, I have presented this piece of evidence, that piece of evidence, that piece of evidence. I've linked them together like this. I think that through line makes sense. So I think it's good enough to convey my argument, for example. Okay, again, sidebar, loving my tangents today, but sidebar for you. Um, that's also a great way to ask for feedback. So rather than going, is it good enough going, I'm trying to do this. This is where I think it's at. I think it does these bits. But I'm concerned it doesn't do that Brilliant way to ask for feedback. Really shows that you've been thinking about. It makes it so much easier for the feedback person to decide what to focus on and how to share with you.

The final thing, nearly final. You can never quite tell if it's final with my podcast. Can you? We'll probably keep going after this. Who knows? Remembering that any of these things were a range. Like I said, you know this, all these things are high jumps. Are we actually, you know, how much you clear it by is a bit of a range, and that can then be decided where you wanna be in that range is a decision rather than a, I just don't know if it's good enough.

So sometimes we wanna just clear the bar to be fair. Sometimes if it's something that's not super, super central to everything we're doing. It just kind of needs to be finished now. Maybe these are things you've offered to do for other people and subsequently regretted. Maybe it's something that's not kind of central to your research question.

We get to go, you know what? My good enough's kind of down here. It's fine. It does its job. It'll get published somewhere, happy days. Other things might be more central. And whilst we don't wanna get to the, it's got to be the perfect thing that if I spent the next 10 years full time on it, it would be there. We might go a little bit higher in that good enough thing. But all of these are not objectively decide, designed and are decisions for you to make. In fact, one of the things that the person I coached on this this morning said was, I know this isn't a don't know question. Vicki, some of you will have asked, heard me talk about this before.

But often we tell ourselves, I don't know if it's good enough or not, when the real question is, I haven't decided if it's good enough yet or not. There isn't an objective out there as to how good it has to be. There's a range around which it will still do the job, and we get to decide where we sit within that.

The final, final, final thing is like, okay, this can make me sound really old. When I was at university, we sent letters to each other. 'cause email was kind of a thing, but only just, and we sent letters. And mine would often end, you know, lots of love Vicki, ps blah, blah, blah, blah, PPS, blah, blah, blah, blah, PPPS, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that's how my conversations go too. So PS, on the end of this, You're research should open more questions. So for some of you, you'll be like, I want this to be good enough that no one ever criticizes it, that there's no further work to be done. 'cause I've answered all the questions. That I was gonna say.

That research doesn't exist. That research only exists if you're asking a very boring question that doesn't go anywhere. We don't want that research. This is not a good outcome to publish a piece of work. This is the last word on a topic is not a good outcome. Think of any seminal paper in your field. In fact, it's called Seminal for a Reason.

People, okay, look it up. Any seminal paper in your area that might have been the last word in terms of being like the review article that everybody quotes or whatever. But it's a starting point for everybody else's research. Even those big dog papers are absolutely starting points, not end points. When you get these big, amazing, interesting pieces of research that open up more questions, even if they've just answered a massive problem in a field, what that does is open a whole new area of research and a whole new field. Your research should leave you with more questions. Whether you are writing your thesis articles, your grants, whether you are writing your professorial applications, it all should be leading to the question of what's next.

What have I not yet done that would be super interesting to do. Every thesis, your thesis should be the beginning of somebody else's thesis. That's the dream. That's how we become part of a scientific community and not just somebody or an academic community, not just somebody who's like scurrying around in the background doing something that nobody cares about.

I want every single one of you in your thesis at the end of it to say the weaknesses, to say the future directions. And I want some other PhD student to pick it up and go, oh, hey, I could start here. There's loads they haven't done. I could do those things. That's not a criticism. That's not you doing it wrong.

That's not you leaving gaps. That's you inspiring a whole new field. That's you inspiring the next generation of academics behind you. We have to leave things for them to do. Literally the point of what we're doing. So how do you know it's good enough? First shortest answer, you don't, but you decide what's the purpose of the thing I'm doing?

Is it good enough to achieve that purpose? As far as I can tell at the moment, the only way we really find out with those more objective things is by testing it. Does it pass? Does it get accepted? Whatever. And we don't use it as an opportunity to prove that we are good enough to prove that no one is gonna criticize us.

We get it done, we congratulate ourselves for it, and then either we or some other researcher takes it on further in the future. I really hope that's helpful. If you've been asking yourself, how do I know if it's good enough? How do I know? I really hope that has answered some questions for you. If you have questions for me, make sure you are on my newsletter. You can go to my website, sign up for the newsletter right there. You'll get a weekly email from me letting you know what's happening in the podcast, giving you the opportunity to come to free coaching webinars, to ask me any questions and all those sorts of things. So make sure you are on that. Let me know whether there's any other challenges you have around whether your work is good enough or not, and thank you all for listening, and I'll see you next week.