I am a big fan of planning. I spend a lot of time on increasing my future capabilities. I learn new programming languages, explore new environments and try to stay up to date on research directions. All of this means that I don’t do as much right now as I probably could. Hopefully, however, it does mean that I do more now than I could have done if I hadn’t followed this strategy in the past. My industry has a name for getting more stuff done up front: Front End Loading, hence the title of this post.
There is a fine balance between getting more done now and being more productive later. I tend to be a ‘sharpen the axe‘ kind of guy — I believe that you work more efficiently with sharp tools, that sharp tools require some time to learn and maintain and that that time tends to be less than what you save. Unfortunately, like any habit, this needs to be kept in check as well. When times are tough, my first instinct is to take a step back and find a better tool. Sometimes that is just procrastination. Sometimes it is time to put your head down and keep chopping.
PS: This whole post was really just a test of twitterfeed.
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