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by Micah Elliott.
Original Post: Defaults Are Good Enough
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This is a constraint-based exercise to force myself to do something quickly and imperfectly.
I have a hard time discerning the right point at which to stop tuning things. It took me three years of searching for the perfect blogging tool before I finally bit the bullet and just forced myself to go with an imperfect one: Blogger. And I've settled on a pretty vanilla default theme. How unlike me! Am I happy with the way it looks overall? Not really, but the default is probably good enough since lots of others use it, and viewers even recognize it. Have I spent hours tweaking various things on it anyway? You bet. Am I satisfied with having a .blogspot.com URL, instead of setting up micahelliott.com (which I own) as my blog entry point? Not really, but lots of others are content enough with it (paulbuchheit.blogspot.com, agiletesting.blogspot.com, sethgodin.typepad.com, etc.) And if I hadn't just settled on it, I'd still be thinking about scaling, SEO, and optimizing everything. But now I'm constrained, and sometimes that's just what you need. What did my three-year pedantry cost me in this case? I could have been blogging years ago, instead of being a secret genius writing only for myself.
I tweaked vim for five years before I finally settled on what I believe to be the perfect color scheme. I've spent seven years creating the perfect personal bash environment. You should see my $PS1. And my mutt/procmail look/configuration -- it's truly beautiful. Does my desktop really need that great picture? What awful time sinks!
I've got 30 articles almost ready to be "published". But they're not quite good enough. Wonder how many of those will actually make it. Should I just go for it? In this case, probably not. This is user-facing. And that's the key difference. Are you a perfectionist in everything you work on, or have you been able to focus your perfectionism on things your users see?
I wrote this post in 5^W 10^W 25 minutes, instead of five hours, to force myself to not fine tune. Is it good enough? Probably, for a Saturday. Time to go enjoy the weekend now.
Note to self: it doesn't have to be perfect if it's just for me. Just go for it.
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