Either finish something as quickly as possible, or as completely as possible. The closer you approach the center of these two extremes, the larger the percentage of your lifespan you’ll spend working on the project.
Either employ rapid-prototyping or perfectionism. That way you either finish something quickly, or rarely have to backtrack.
With rapid-prototyping,
you know you have to go back and fix it later, so you prioritize getting something substantial as fast as possible. Fixing it will take time, but at least you’ve created the first version in entirety.
With perfectionism,
finishing something will take a long time, but you’ll have nearly perfected it. This way, you will rarely have to backtrack and correct your work or fix something.
If you are somewhere in between
with your workflow, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to balance getting it right and getting it on paper. As you create more things, you’ll feel the need to continuously tweak them until they’re correct, and you’ll take a lot longer to finish the whole product (if you even get there). This is because you don’t have a solid priority; you’re kind of “feeling it out”, and this will sap your motivation as you sink more hours into a project without it being either complete or perfect, just somewhere in between.
I’ve been in this limbo with basically all my projects ever and it’s the biggest sap on my productivity since acne. I’m going to try to make a conscious decision to choose a workflow priority for my future projects, and we’ll see where things go. Thanks for reading! :)
What do you think? Have I categorized this issue correctly? Do you have relevant anecdotes? Do you like lahmajun? I like lahmajun.
About this picture
On top of the Empire State Building like hey what’s going on my yorkian friends.