Sam Gentle.com

Failure

Things have been pretty busy the last few weeks, with my new prototype push and other new things I'm working on. I slipped up last week or so and, rather than writing a failure post and cutting my losses, I figured I would just make it up the next day. That didn't happen, and I just got used to being a day behind. Eventually it got to the point where I missed another one.

Of course, I should have seen this coming. I've previously had a very similar failure and I wrote about the general problem of ignoring minor failures after that. The problem isn't that you need to take minor failures too seriously, but that you need to treat failures of the system that corrects minor failures way more seriously than the minor failures themselves. I had thought about this already, of course, but I made the mistake all the same.

I think part of the reason that happened was that I hadn't really figured out what to put in my failure post. I normally try to go to the effort of analysing my failures so I can improve on them, but the original failure was basically "I was busy and slipped". I wanted to have more to say than that. In retrospect, it wasn't really worth putting it off until I had something better to say, because I ended up not doing it at all.

To stop this from happening again, I'm going to commit to writing a failure post if I miss my deadline no matter what. I think to some extent I still want to optimise that goalpost and be flexible with the deadline, but I have to fight that urge. Doing it just kicks the problem down the road and makes my life more complicated. Better to cut my losses as soon as it happens and move on.