Last week at work we sent off the manuscript of the fourth edition of NYC’s Best Public Pre-kindergarten and Elementary Schools, coming out in 2017.

The book is a collaboration that has several contributors but foremost is author is Clara Hemphill. She and I got together two Fridays ago, on deadline day, to incorporate revisions and edits from the printed hard copy into the final Word document.

Like Chris, Clara is a Now person, and so without fuss she got to work.

The whole project still felt unreal to me even though I’d participated every step of the way: I’d drawn up lists of schools, kept track of the schedule, visited schools and wrote profiles.

In the final two weeks of fact checking I worked diligently enough but sluggishness threatened to defeat me—a drumbeat of I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

But somehow I could, or did, fact by fact, day by day. Once the copy was in and formatted, I fact checked some 75-school profiles, and read over the introduction, preface and acknowledgments. Clara edited and trimmed profiles to fit them neatly on each page, a process called “killing the widows and orphans”—these are words or short lines at the beginning or end of a paragraph, which are left dangling at the top or bottom of a page.

I found the whole process fascinating, especially the old-school way Clara went about it. First, on a paper printout, she drew red lines through extraneous words and lines and put “-1” in the margins until she’d trimmed each school profile to fit one or two pages, and then she typed all changes into the Word doc.

My job, fact checking, was new for me, and tricky—I couldn’t find every fact online and school principals were on vacation and hard to reach. Most of all, fact checking daunted me with its buck-stops-here finality.

My perfectionism kicked in, working like a doorstop in my brain. Perversely, as the deadline neared, I slowed down, wanting to ruminate over every line, every odd little fact.

But there was no time.

At home, I asked Chris, who has been through this more than 60 times, what he does near the end of a book—how he brings it home under pressure and knows when it’s good enough. He told me that at some point you have to realize you’re not fully in control; that it will take on a life of its own. You have to let it go.

No wonder I found the process hard near the end. Letting go has never been my strong suit.

Here, then, for what it’s worth, is my own personal “let it go” list:

The fish you catch. I worried I wouldn’t catch all the factual errors. Clara said, “There will always be errors. You have to think of all the ones you did catch, not the ones you didn’t catch.”

A single thing. Goethe said something like To meet the tasks of each day is to fulfill your duty. Instead of thinking about the whole book it helped to focus on a single day, a single hour (a single school, a single fact).

Think big. Contrary to item two, it’s helpful to let go of the minutiae and look at the enormity of what you have accomplished. During our final hour, Clara was hunched over the computer, eyes intent on the screen as she made her way through Brooklyn. On one of my trips in and out of her office, bringing the tiniest of changes to add to or delete from the manuscript, she sat back in her chair with what looked like an expression of total fatigue.

We’ll never finish,” I thought.

All at once she sat up straight and gestured to the messy, two-inch thick manuscript on her desk filled with words and red editing marks and said, “Look what we’ve done! It’s amazing! We rock!”

My fear and fatigue vanished in an instant.

It won’t be perfect. It will have a life of its own. And so, I let it go.