Here’s something we’ve all experienced. You wake up late, and miracourasly get dressed and out the door in minutes. But had you been awake 2 hours earlier, would you have gotten ready as quickly? For most of us, it would have taken us 2 hours to get ready.
If you have a lot of time to complete a task, you’ll make plans, organize yourself, and get “ready” to work. In the end, you spend 80% of that time just organizing papers and thinking, but not actually working on anything. In the end, all your work would total only about 5-10% of the allocated time the task was assigned.
I know that if I’m coding something, and have a big gap of time, I either won’t start doing anything until I absolutely have to, or, I’ll begin by taking my sweet time coming up with neat flow charts, and coding every possible scenario that “could” happen into my program. Whereas if I was pressed for time, I would only code the bare essentials. What’s the task? OK. (12 hours later) This program completes that task.
I noticed that I personally take a lot of time because I wanna ensure high quality in whatever I’m doing. What I’ve been failing to realize was that a finished product of the lowest quality is 100% better than having an incomplete product of higher caliber. Indeed, I usually end up having NO product.
I’ve thought about this for a long time but didn’t know until about a year ago that it’s known (and therefore deems me sane): Parkinson’s Law