Tell me if this sounds familiar.
You’re at work, wrapping up some work thing. Could be a nine-month project that has cost you more than a few hairs or some mundane pain in the ass that you run through every Tuesday morning before your boss gets in — whatever. You finish it up, stick into whatever mechanism is going to deliver it and hit the equivalent of “send”. You’re elated to have it off your plate so you can move on to bigger and better things.
Then you realize that you forgot something. Maybe you spent 30 minutes drafting an email describing the whoop-ass sales forecast that you spent weeks making awesome, but forgot to attach. Or, perhaps you’re watching the truck drive away with 2500 units of part 75-B when the customer ordered 75-C and asked you three times to get it right because the world would end if you didn’t. No matter what the particulars of the situation happen to be, you just made, relative to the situation, a pretty damn colossal blunder and you’d kinda like to go stick your face in a brier patch. We’ve all been there and it frickin’ sucks. Here’s my suggestion - I call it “one percent dumbass insurance”.
However much time you spent building the retaining wall, writing the web application or mixing the homemade parrot shampoo, spend one percent more of that time making sure you didn’t dork something up along the way. If you spent 30 minutes writing a blog post, spend an additional 30 seconds reading it over for obvious errors. Built your kid a bike in two hours? Tack on an extra 2 minutes to make sure all of the bolts are tightened and you didn’t put the seat on backward. Six months into your wedding plans? Give it six extra days (peppered throughout, ideally) to ensure that you didn’t forget anything.
You can almost always do better, no matter what “it” is. Us nerdy folk, when we’re at our best, take a little extra time to ensure that the shit is done correctly. And, in the grand scheme of things, one extra percent is hardly a big sacrifice when it can save you from being the big knob who forgot to attach the stupid sales forecast. Again.
[...] Quote of the Day: Brett Kelly “However much time you spent building the retaining wall, writing the web application or mixing the homemade parrot shampoo, spend one percent more of that time making sure you didn’t dork something up along the way.” — Brett Kelly [...]