Seth's Blog : Digital prepwork

Digital prepwork

It’s so tempting to simply begin painting a wall. After all, it’s pretty easy to lay down paint.

But it turns out that masking and dropcloths, painstakingly put into place, save many hours compared to cleaning up a mess afterward.

The same is true for what happens when we have a new hard drive or a blank document.

A file organization and backup system takes a few minutes to set up. It saves hundreds of hours in finding files, organizing versions and recovering from an (inevitable) system failure.

Using templates, master sheets and structured ways to hold data is far more resilient than simply putting some text and images on the page in a way that looks good.

Programmers who comment their code as they go ultimately get the real work done faster.

Establishing source control protocols among team members is a tiny price to pay for avoiding duplicated work.

If you don’t have time to do it right, how will you find the time to do it over?

You can tell if a house painter is any good before the first brushstroke is applied. And you can figure out if your designers, system architects or coders are good in the very same way.