jeffturner.net

Working to work

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking stock of how I operate on various development projects. The big conclusion I’ve drawn is this: I end up doing a lot of the same work over and over.

But not because I’m terribly inefficient or missing some frameworks or tools. It’s because the problems I’m solving are generally complicated enough to be interesting, but not so complex that I don’t want to do them.

In other words, I’m working to work.

Joel’s great follow-up on Architecture astronauts was the first clue, but the nail came from this article on workaholics (via 37 Signals):

…as perfectionists, they may become so fixated on inconsequential details that they find it hard to move on to the next task, Robinson said.

As Porter put it: “They’re not looking for ways to be more efficient; they’re just looking for ways to always have more work to do.”

That’s it, in a nutshell.