"If it isn't right, it's wrong"

Perfectionism marks work in two categories. A thing is right, or it's wrong. There's no grade for good, or fine, or did the job. Anything short of the top mark lands in the same bin as failure.

You can hear it in the way people with this habit talk about their own efforts. The dinner was ruined, when what happened was that the potatoes were slightly overdone. The presentation was a disaster, when one slide was out of order. The whole house is a tip, when there's a pile of post on the table.

Two-category marking has some odd effects, and the oddest is that it makes you do less. If a job can only be done perfectly or not at all, then whenever perfect isn't available, not at all is what's left. You don't tidy the spare room because you haven't a full day to do it properly. You don't start learning the piano because you'll never be good. You don't invite people round because the house isn't how you'd want it seen. People take perfectionism for an excess of effort, and it produces a surprising amount of nothing.

It also explains why perfectionists give up on things abruptly. A new runner misses a week and concludes that the plan is broken. Someone learning Spanish has one humiliating exchange in a shop and stops. If the only passing grade is flawless, then the first flaw ends the attempt, and first flaws come early in anything worth learning.

The alternative is to mark in grades, as every sensible examiner does. In place of right and wrong, try a scale of one to ten and ask what this particular job needs. A note to the window cleaner needs a three. It has to be legible and say which day. An email arranging a meeting needs a five. A summary for your team needs a seven, which means clear, accurate and readable, with nothing that would mislead. A submission to a regulator or a wedding speech might need a nine.

Hardly anything needs a ten. Tens are for a very few things in a life, and even those are usually judged by other people on a kinder scale than yours.

When you think in grades, two things change. The first is that you can aim, which you couldn't before. "Make it perfect" gives you no stopping point, whereas "make it a seven" does, because you know roughly what a seven looks like. The second is that a seven delivered to a job that needed a seven is a complete success, with nothing held back. You haven't settled for less. You've hit the target, and the three points you didn't add were never wanted by anyone.

The grades apply at home as much as at work. Think about having friends round for supper. The two-category version says the house must be spotless, the food must be impressive and nothing may go wrong, and so you have people round twice a year and are too tired to enjoy it when you do. Ask what the evening is for. Your friends are coming to see you. They need somewhere to sit, enough to eat and a host who isn't in the kitchen for the whole evening. That's a five for the house and a six for the food. Nobody has ever gone home from a good evening talking about the skirting boards. People remember whether they laughed, and whether you seemed glad they'd come.

You might object that this is just lowering your standards with better manners. I'd say it's the opposite. Someone who gives everything a ten's worth of effort isn't showing high standards. They're showing that they can't tell jobs apart. Real judgment about quality includes judging how much a thing needs. A good cook doesn't plate a Tuesday supper as if for a competition, and that tells you nothing about how well they can cook.

There's a private cost to two-category marking that I'll mention before moving on. If everything short of perfect is failure, then you fail most days, since most days contain something imperfect. A person who fails most days, by their own marking, ends up with a low opinion of themselves however good their work is. Grading gives you back the large middle of your own life, where most of what you do is good and is allowed to count as good.