The pursuit of perfection can be crippling. I’ve been working on a post about mechanical keyboards off and on for over a year, and the other day I realized the reason I haven’t finished it is I want it to be perfect. I’ve built it up so much in my mind that anything less than my vision for it is inadequate.
Maybe it’s because I’m a little OCD, or that I like to impress people, or that I hold myself to high standards. While any of those (or all of those) could contribute, at the end of the day my desire to deliver the “perfect” post is standing in the way of me finishing that post at all.
I’m not sure what “the answer” is2, I know that at this point I need to set a deadline and publish my best effort. So by next Friday (June 21st), I’ll publish something about mechanical keyboards. It probably won’t be perfect, but it will be done.
Translation: ”Perfect is the enemy of good”, or more literally “the best is the enemy of the good.” (Source: Wikipedia) ↩︎
Here I go again, looking for the “perfect” answer to this dilemma of perfectionism. ↩︎
Disclaimer: This article contains my own thoughts and feelings on the topic of working remotely. Everyone’s situation varies, so please take what you feel works, and leave what you feel doesn’t. As always, the opinions expressed in this article don’t necessarily represent the opinions of my employer, and shouldn’t be construed as such.
“We like to give people the freedom to work where they want, safe in the knowledge that they have the drive and expertise to perform excellently, whether they [are] at their desk or in their kitchen. Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.”
— Richard Branson, Founder and Chairman of Virgin
Remote work is a hot topic right now, with many companies looking beyond co-located teams in order to expand the available talent pool, and offering their employees a potentially better work/life balance. I’ve had the opportunity to work for Bleacher Report remotely for the last three years1, and wanted to offer a glimpse into my experiences over that time.
I’m going to take a Twitter break, maybe permanently. I would normally Irish exit, but I wanted to write down some of my thoughts since Twitter has been a large part of my life over the last ten years.
I joined Twitter in March of 2008 while doing some homework for my “Object Oriented Programming in Java” course. Twitter was (of course) smaller back then. We often participated in “Follow Fridays” where we suggested interesting people to follow. We regularly encountered the Fail Whale. We tweeted all-lowercase status updates, standardized retweets and @mentions, and fought over which link shortener to use. I made tons of friends, many of whom I went on to meet in person, and some I have yet to.
I remember those days fondly, but lately I’ve found myself spending far too much time and attention scrolling through updates that I largely don’t care about. Retweets, quote tweets, memes, hot takes. (And yes, I know I’m likely guilty of polluting your feeds with the same.) The signal-to-noise ratio of my feed has deteriorated to a point where it’s no longer worth the time and attention I was giving it.
As a replacement, I’m hoping to spend more time reading and writing longer-form content.
Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.
This clip of Bryan Cranston’s character Hal trying to replace a light bulb, but being distracted by an apparently endless set of tasks before being able to, illustrates it nicely.
I’ve been doing some yak shaving of my own over the Christmas break in order to accomplish the seemingly simple task of publishing an article. Writing the article is easy enough, but then the supposed prerequisites creep in:
“Where do I publish the article? OK, my blog is dead; I need a new blog. Hmm, this design doesn’t suit me anymore, I need to redesign it. Well I definitely need to come up with a new name for the site…”
It’s a never ending list of things to do in order to “just” publish an article.
But here I am, with my “shaved yak” (a new domain name, a new blogging platform, and a spiffy new design [which I’m quite proud of]). Now I can finally start on the task of writing the promised article about custom mechanical keyboards.
There are always more yaks to shave, but hopefully with this particular one out of the way I can focus on the long list of things I’d like to write about.
