Categories
Uncategorized

Perfect is the Enemy of Done

I’ve finally gotten round to re-hosting my blog — I was previously using Gandi‘s Dotclear installation which came free with my domain name but I got fed up of it because the comment spam filtering was useless and I found the markup difficult to use. The old blog is currently still hosted at https://tempblog.m0tei.co.uk but may move in the near future. This blog is now hosted by the lovely people at the SRCF (full disclosure: I’m on the committee of the SRCF).

I’ve been intending to re-host it for a while but I spent a long time deciding what platform to use. I ruled out wordpress early on because it was too bulky and slow — PHP and MySQL, really!? For just a blog!? I tried a few static content generators but ruled those out for some reason or another too, and I eventually decided that this was a job for later, when I could find time to do it perfectly.

And that’s the problem. Recently, I realised that a lot of my projects end up unfinished because I can’t do them perfectly. My bench frequency reference, my reprap, my Sinclair C5 indicators (I’ve bought a Sinclair C5 since my last post — more on that another time) and various programming projects — all ended up coming to a stall. Or if for some reason I absolutely have to finish something, I tell myself that there’s no point in doing it just alright — if it’s not going to be perfect anyway, I may as well put the absolute bare minimum effort in and do a horrific bodge of it.

But enough is enough. As they say, perfect is the enemy of done. Over the last week or two I’ve been trying to get myself into that mindset. I’m going to start finishing some projects which have dragged on for too long. I may not be able to do them perfectly but that’s fine – I’ll at least get them done. First up was migrating my blog. WordPress may not be perfect, but it will get the job done. So I’ve used that and now the job is done.

To help me keep this in mind, I made a motivational poster to go on my wall — I took a piece of scrap paper, scrawled “PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF DONE” on it and taped it up in front of me with parcel tape.

IMG_20140705_185134

It’s not perfect, but hey — it’s done.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *