My new boss got on to me trying to “boil the ocean” on a project where we really just needed a very simple script for converting question formats. But to me, the simple script would have been so simple that I personally wouldn’t have considered it very useful. So, as I often do, I started to expand the requirements and scope into something that would fix a lot of the other related problems as I perceive them. But she was right to call me out on it because, in doing so, I was taking forever to just get the simple script available and solve any problem at all.

This is something I’m guilty of doing a lot. And it’s weird because, out of one side of my mouth, I’ll preach the importance of the minimum viable product and continuous improvement. But then I’ll put off creating something simple by telling myself that I might as well wait until I have the time to do it “right”. But inevitably, I never actually have the time to do it “right”!

This blog is a victim of that. I created this thing because I knew I was going to be looking for a new job, and I looked back over my decades of experience and realized I had nothing to show for it because it was all trapped inside my old employer. So I created the blog, wrote a “Hello World” article, and planned all the amazing content I would put here. I was unemployed for six months. I have a list of almost a hundred different articles, tips, tricks, how-to guides, etc., that I planned to write (most of which I had already created in some form in my old job mind you), but in the last six months I’ve written like five things. And I’m not really happy with any of those! For every idea, rather than just write a quick version in a few days, I would take a month to tweak and mentally expand the scope, turning every simple tip into a comprehensive 5 part series that never actually made it out of my brain and onto the page.

So, here I am, trying to break that trend by writing a simple and short article (albeit one that is nothing but me complaining about myself) in the hopes that it will be the first step towards doing a better job of this. And I’m failing! I started (as I often do) by rambling into my voice notes app and then dumping the transcript here to edit, which I’ve now wasted 2 hours doing! So I’m stopping now. This is the end of this self rant, no more tweaks. And tomorrow. rather than mentally wrestling with my big plan for a huge comprehensive series about the power of accessibility tools in your browser to assist in content creation, I need to just throw out the quick article that says, “Hey, did you know you can take a full page screenshot?” like I originally planned to do.

Will I actually pull this off? Or will this article sit here as the most recent item on my blog for the next six months? Only time will tell.