Why Do Today What You Can Put Off Until Tomorrow?
I’ve always been incredibly lazy and as a child I always remember my mother saying to me… “why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?” On the surface it seems like good advice – a method for being productive and getting things done but in the business world time is so precious that I always feel that it’s best to put off doing anything that doesn’t really need to be done.
As regular readers will know, recently I have been beavering away at my software project and recently I announced some estimated release dates for the first couple of releases. When you build anything – whether it is a piece of software, a blog, or any kind of website, the majority of your time will go into the major work of the project but you’ll also find that time needs to be spent on polishing things up, fixing issues, adding little enhancements and so on. These can be major productivity killers.
I use a system called Trac to manage the tasks in my project and as I go along I will raise a ticket for myself to do various odd jobs such as fixing a bug, making enhancements and so on and this week I found that a big chunk of my time was spent trying to knock out some of the tickets that had been piling up. However this is time consuming and while I am working on odd jobs like that I am not working on the major development features so I want to cut down on this time as much as possible.
There are some things that are high priority and really need to be addressed. For example, if the submission code for a site stops working, I need to see what has changed and fix it asap. However there are other things that are just ‘nice’ to have and these are where I will deliberately put them off. Yesterday as I was going through my outstanding tickets I took four of them that I had against the current release and pushed them back to the next one. They don’t need to be worked on right now and I can happily put them off until later.
My mother would not be happy at this attitude but it makes business sense. I have already spent far longer getting up to speed on the project than I imagined so now that I am close to release I don’t want any further delays. When you start thinking of all the little things that can be tweaked it’s so easy to just go on and on and never finish. This is true of any kind of project. This is a situation in which procrastination is good! It’s basically the 80/20 rule – spend your time on the 20% that matters and leave all the rest until later.
If you’re working on some new project such as getting a blog up and running, you may easily find yourself falling into this trap. Another new plugin to install, a tweak to the design, etc etc. Get the essentials done and then go! Come back to those things later. If you can put it off until later then do!
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Karl Foxley
November 21, 2009
Very sage advice. I think if I ever told my mum I was putting something of until tomorrow she would give me that look only mums can give! :)
Regards,
Karl
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