Learn to Accept Reality and Go With The Flow
It is ridiculously hot in Seattle right now. We’re in the middle of a very unusual heat wave–I’ve lived here for the majority of my life and I don’t ever remember a stretch like this! Most people here aren’t prepared for hot weather–I’d say at most 5% of homes have air conditioning.
But, I’m not complaining. Since it’s so often cloudy and overcast in Seattle, I try very hard not to complain about the times when it’s uncomfortably hot. In fact, I think there’s a lesson to be learned from this heat that can be applied to developing a web site.
All-Time Record High for Seattle
When it comes to the weather, Mother Nature doesn’t always cooperate with what us hooomans, as the LOLcats like to say, have planned. We plan a wedding, but it rains. We plan to work, but it’s 99 degrees and there’s no AC in the office, so it’s impossible to concentrate.
In other words, there are things beyond our control, and accepting that is important. Learning to go with the flow is a very valuable skill.
One thing that’s beyond our control is knowing exactly how long it’s going to take to get a project done.
For example, we’ve been working on a project at Cheezburger that we’re going to be rolling out in phases over the next few months. Our plan was to ship the first phase this week, but it’s not ready yet. At that point, we sort of had some options:
We could be rigid, and have shipped when it wasn’t ready simply for the purpose of “meeting our schedule”. But, we’re just going to spend the next week fixing the things that we’re ready. The customers will be unhappy, the bosses will be aggravated, and the developers will be demoralized. This is a lousy plan.
We could beat ourselves up and burn the midnight oil, so that it “shipped on schedule”. While that may ship this phase on time, and make the dev team feel like heroes, it will likely result in a delay on the next phase because a) we will have burned ourselves out, b) haste makes waste (i.e. bugs) that we’ll have to spend time fixing. This is also a lousy plan.
Or, we could accept reality: it’s taking us between 3-7 days longer than we thought it would. (Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say. But, I’m also pretty sure that when they started building Rome they couldn’t predict accurately how long it would take.)
Personally, I don’t see a lot of value in trying to bend reality toward arbitrary hooman schedules. Nobody wins with rigidity–it just creates a lot of extra effort and stress without much benefit. Just like we can’t always control or predict the weather, sometimes we can’t control or predict how a project will go either.
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