I used to have this problem. A project I led had a defined set of features that were requested by marketing for the next release as well as a defined list of bugs to fix. The schedule wasn’t looking good at all, so I was working silly hours trying to make up the slack to get them done–which led to more fatigue, which led to more bugs, etc.

My manager sat me down to ask about the project, and I told him what was going on. He gave me one piece of advice that I’ve used ever since:

“Shipping is a feature. Not shipping is a P1/S1 bug [priority 1/severity 1]. Any feature except shipping, and any bug except failure to ship, can be triaged.”

Once you think of “completion by X date”, “completion by Y date”, and “completion without killing morale” as features to be implemented (with individual priorities), it’s a lot easier to make these kinds of decisions.

By the way, this incident happened around 1994, but I’ve heard “shipping is a feature” many times since then, so I don’t know from where the phrase originates.

“My best” is a subjective and changing phenomenon. Some days (hopefully most) my best is better than it was the day before. But some days I’m tired, or distracted, or I have a headache, and my best is less than it was before.

I almost wrote my best is less than it should be — part of me believes having a headache or being tired is a moral failure.

So when I look back at how I coached one of my team members at work last year, I have this constant refrain of “You know better than that,” and “you should have done it this way…” going through my head.

But the thing is, I didn’t learn how to do it better until this summer. I know better now, but I didn’t then, and to judge the actions of the “then me” by the standard of the “now me” is pretty stupid. But if I don’t stop myself I’d do it all the time.

When I am drawing for instance, I will stop in the middle of what I am doing and decide that I don’t like it. “I can do better than this,” I’ll think. Sometimes that attitude helps and I see how I can do better and finish what I am working on. But other times I just trash what I am working on and start over.

Now, I have heard that the difference between genius and failure is that genius keeps trying. But the real genius is knowing when to stop trying and accept what you have. I can keep redoing drawings until I’m dead but when I have a deadline and the publisher is asking for my illustration I have to give him something. I have discovered that even though I don’t like a lot of what ends up in the publisher’s hands most of it is good enough. I get paid, the publisher is happy, and I move on to the next project.

If I am honest with myself, sometimes ‘my’ best is pretty mediocre. But then I can honestly say I did ‘my’ best even if it’s not ‘the’ best… and my best always gets better.

To always want to do my best seriously hurted me more than I wanted.

Once I was trying to write a IRC library in Python.. my first draft was awesome, people said. Totally clean, nice error handling, flexible, etc. The thing is, I spent more than someone would problem spend *finishing* the whole thing.

So it’s a mixed feeling: I just did this thing and it’s great but I’m depressed because there 70% of it undone and I’ve already spent a lot of time, you know?