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How to Stop Over-Perfecting Your Teaching and Get More Time Back

If you’re a teacher who spends hours refining lesson plans, tweaking resources, and making sure every detail is just right, this guide is for you. Today, I’ll show you how to shift your mindset and adopt a ‘good enough’ approach—without sacrificing quality teaching.

Why This Matters

Spending endless hours fine-tuning lessons doesn’t just eat into your evenings—it contributes to stress, burnout, and emotional exhaustion.

When you learn to stop over-perfecting, you’ll:

  • Have more time for yourself, your family, and your well-being.
  • Feel less guilt about leaving work at school.
  • Deliver great lessons without getting caught in unnecessary details.

Unfortunately…

Many teachers don’t embrace “good enough” because they feel:

  • Guilty—thinking more time spent planning equals better teaching.
  • Pressured—by school expectations, colleagues, and even themselves.
  • Anxious—worrying that a lesson won’t be as effective as it could be.
  • Trapped in perfectionism—believing that if it isn’t flawless, it isn’t good enough.
The Biggest Reason Teachers Struggle to Let Go of Perfectionism

The belief that more effort always equals better results.

ut teaching isn’t about perfection. It’s about effectiveness. The reality? A solid, well structured lesson—delivered with confidence—will always outperform a ‘perfect’
lesson that took hours to tweak.

Other Reasons Teachers Struggle to Stop Over-Perfecting:
  • They think students will notice every small flaw. (They won’t!)
  • They fear looking unprepared. (Preparation is key, but endless tweaking isn’t.)
  • They’re used to doing everything manually. (There are smarter ways to work!)
  • They don’t trust their own judgment. (If it meets learning goals, it’s enough!)
  • The good news? You can break free from this cycle. Here’s how.
Step 1: Define Essential Learning Outcomes (Everything Else is Extra)

This is the 1 way to reduce time spent perfecting lessons. Instead of worrying about making everything polished, ask yourself:

  1. What are the 1-3 key things my students must understand by the end of this lesson?
  2. Does every activity directly support these outcomes?
  3. Am I overcomplicating things that don’t impact learning?

Example:
Imagine you’re planning a science lesson on circuits. The essential outcome is that students understand how a circuit works.

  • Necessary: A hands-on circuit-building activity.
  • Unnecessary: A perfectly formatted, colour-coded PowerPoint with fancy animations.

Teacher Tip: Before you tweak anything, check—does this actually improve learning? If not, let it go.

Step 2: Use AI to Quickly Generate Supporting Materials

Many teachers struggle because they think everything must be made from scratch. It doesn’t. AI tools can generate a solid starting point for worksheets, quizzes, and slides—so you don’t waste hours on formatting.

Where Teachers Go Wrong

  • Spending an hour creating a worksheet that AI could generate in seconds.
  • Writing model answers from scratch when AI could give a draft to tweak.

What To Do Instead

  • Then, spend minimal time tweaking instead of building from the ground up.

Teacher Tip: Let AI do the heavy lifting—you add the finishing touches.

Step 3: Set a Time Limit for Fine-Tuning (And Stick to It!)

This is where so many teachers go wrong. They don’t set a stopping point. They tweak and tweak… until hours have disappeared.

The Fix? Time Constraints.

  • Set a 15-minute timer for final refinements. When the timer goes off? You stop.

Why this works:

  • Forces you to focus on the biggest impact tweaks.
  • Stops you from making changes that don’t actually improve learning.
  • Trains your brain to be okay with ‘good enough’.

Teacher Tip: If you wouldn’t notice the change a week later, it wasn’t worth making.

Step 4: Get Comfortable with Leaving Certain Tasks Unfinished

Some tasks just don’t need to be done before the lesson. or at all.

What’s Okay to Leave Unfinished?

  • A worksheet that’s functional but not “pretty”.
  • A slide deck that doesn’t have fancy transitions.
  • A lesson plan that’s written in bullet points instead of full paragraphs.

Teaching isn’t about aesthetics—it’s about impact.

Teacher Tip: Before obsessing over small details, ask—will this actually make my lesson more effective? If not, let it go.

Step 5: Reflect on Effectiveness, Not Aesthetics

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is student learning.

After a lesson, ask:

  • Did my students engage with the material?
  • Did they understand the key concepts?
  • What worked well that I can do again?

What doesn’t matter?

  • Whether the handouts were beautifully designed.
  • Whether the slides had the perfect font pairing.
  • Whether you reworded the lesson objective five times.

Teacher Tip: Judge a lesson by its impact—not how polished it looked.

Final Thoughts: ‘Good Enough’ is More Than Enough

Teaching is an ongoing process. Some lessons will be brilliant. Others will be “good enough.” And that’s perfectly fine.

What your students need isn’t perfection—they need an engaged, well-rested, confident teacher.

So next time you’re tempted to spend an extra hour tweaking? Don’t

Close the laptop. Walk away. Go enjoy your life.

Because good enough is already great.

What’s one thing you can let go of today? Drop a comment below!

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