Another pattern I’ve observed is forcing itself to the forefront of my mind today. My shorthand for it is: I can tick you off now, or I can tick you off later. I promise, now is preferable.
Today’s culprit is a small woodworking project I hoped to have finished weeks ago. Life and learning curves intervened to cause a series of delays and setbacks (so it goes). But I finally got all the pieces cut, routed, drilled, and sanded, so everything came together beautifully. I put on one layer of stain, and the color was perfect.
I came back the next morning to apply the finish, and the stain had absorbed and was about two shades lighter than I wanted.
I had two options: 1) just finish the blasted thing, or 2) suck it up and accept that I needed another day for staining.
Option one is very appealing in the moment. This thing had been taking up space in my workroom for weeks. I’d already had an unavoidable1 delay, and I wanted my work surfaces back and the visual clutter gone. I could make that happen within a few hours if I just put on some Danish oil and called it good enough.
The problem with option one, though, is that it gets filed under “tick me off later.”
I get immediate gratification. I get my space back. I get the functional object that I was building to solve a problem I actually have.
Also, I get the experience of being annoyed every time I look at it from here until the end of my days because it is two shades lighter than I wanted and doesn’t integrate in with the rest of the furniture as desired.
So I chose the much less appealing (in the moment) option: “tick me off now.” I suck it up for another 36 hours, and I get precisely2 what I want. I get the satisfaction of having made an idea manifest in physical reality, and I get to continue to have exactly what I want in perpetuity because I was willing to be annoyed for that extra 36 hours.
This option, while certainly preferable in the long run, is always less appealing in the moment when you need to make the decision.
I first articulated this concept back in grad school. As gigantic science nerds are wont to, my advisor would always be champing at the bit to see the first pilot data after I started prototyping a new experiment. Unfortunately, the raw numbers recorded are meaningless until they undergo a bunch of organizing, cleanup, processing, and graphing, which requires writing custom code.
The other key point here is that when you are first setting up a new experiment, using new equipment, or using new analysis techniques, you aren’t 100% sure what, exactly, you need to be doing. This is unavoidable.
The first time we went through this exercise, I put together exactly what was asked for as quickly as I could. Glorious!—until, inevitably, an edit was requested. Because I had slapped together some brute-force code in the shortest time possible to get the requested result, changing that code took nearly as long as writing it from scratch. And there were dozens of changes.
The second time we went through this exercise, I dug my heels in. We would see no data until the code was ready, and my advisor could be as annoyed with that delay as he wanted to be. It wouldn’t make the process go any faster, but it’s a way to pass the time. Having had haste bite me in the hind parts, I took my sweet time constructing code around making edits to the process as simple (and traceable!) as possible.
While I did get rather a lot of “it’s still not done?” in the lead-up, as soon as we got into iteration (which begins, with no exaggeration, within the first 5 minutes of looking at new data), the value of my obstinance became clear. Within seconds, I could change a parameter and apply it to the entire analysis to see what happened. Any time “lost” to building properly structured code was gained back tenfold.
It is often frustrating in the moment—to you and anyone who wants something from you—to deny gratification and do what needs to be done in the way it will best serve you going forward.
Suck it up and do it anyway.
If something is going to either tick you off now, or tick you off later, choose now. (I hereby give you full permission to chunter through all your favorite oaths and swears if it helps.)
We smelled gas in the utility room. The nice man from the gas company checked our pipes, told us we had eight (8) leaks, shut everything off at the meter, and told us we could have nice things again, like hot water and central heat, when it was fixed. And there went the time slated for finishing this project.
Defined here as “to the best of my skills and abilities,” which is decent and workable, but I’ve got plenty of, uh, room for growth in my skills as a woodworker.