Justin Lall

Oops September 2, 2011

In case you were wondering what that was, I just accidentally published my ideas for future blog posts. I keep a draft that I update every now and then because I forget my ideas quickly. I always knew that I would inevitably click “post” rather than “save as draft” one day, yet somehow I still never transferred it to a word document where that mistake would be impossible. Chalk another one up to laziness.

Speaking of laziness, I don’t edit. Like, ever. Maintaining the list of possible topics to cover is pretty much the only planning I ever do before writing a post. Some of my posts are embarrassingly poorly written because I never proofread. I rarely even read a post after I write it. The way I rationalize this is behavior is that I am a pretty intense perfectionist, so once I start editing something I write, I cannot stop until it’s perfect. While an average post takes me half an hour to write, editing might consume another 3 hours.

That is how I rationalized it when I went to school as well. I simply wouldn’t write papers even though I enjoyed writing because it was too time consuming. A solution I was offered was to simply not even look at it after I wrote it, for high school that was good enough. This made starting a paper much easier as it wasn’t much of a time commitment. But let’s be real, this is all about laziness, not perfectionism.

As my friend Aaron Haspel told me, there are definite diminishing returns on editing, and 15 minutes can clean up 90 % of what needs to be cleaned up. I think I am ready to grow up and take enough pride in my work to dedicate 15 extra minutes to a post.

Maybe after that, I will start planning the structure of my posts for 10 minutes before I start writing!

Let’s not get crazy though, baby steps.