Leon Mika

I’m coming to realise that one of my shortcomings is not completely following through on a task. I’ve got a habit of only doing enough to get it done quickly, knowing that the work has cracks in it and just hoping that things won’t fall through them. There are a few reasons for this and there the one’s that you expect: laziness, boredom, pressure to get something finished, wanting to move onto something else, etc.

As you can expect, I get burned by this. And over the last several months it got to the point where it was starting to becoming a noticeable problem. So, I adopted the following rule: “no more half measures”¹. If I’ve got a task to do, the I do the whole task.

I broke that rule a few days ago. With the pressure to get something out the door, I finished the work knowing that there existed a case where it wouldn’t work properly. I was hoping to address this over the next week or so, and was not expecting (or hoping, to be more accurate) that this shortcoming will show up.

Well, today it did. Fortunately it was just in testing but sure enough the shortcut came back to bite me, and now I’ll need to fix it.

I guess it’s a good opportunity to reset and take this rule seriously once again.