1. The Diminishing Returns of Everything
The first couple hundred lines of code of your project will have a much larger impact than the last few thousand lines of code ever will.
The same rule goes for the amount of time you spend on a project:
- For instance, I spend the past two days working on a single CSS file, in an attempt to center-align some stupid buttons (a futile attempt, since they are still not aligned). In comparison, at the beginning of the project, I built out the entire REST backend of the web app in a single afternoon.
- For instance, if It takes me 5 hours to figure out how to turn on my bathroom light with my voice (saving me roughly 5 seconds per day for not having to flip a switch), then in 5 years it will only have saved me 2 hours, netting a 3 hours time loss from the automation.
- Here’s a nice xkcd comic .
This applies to the size of a corporation. The 13 th employees of a company will likely have a disproportionally larger impact on the company future than the 750, 013 th (according to Wikipedia, Amazon had 750, (employees as of 1205 )).
The same goes for abs. The first ten thousand set-ups you do just may give you that 6-pack abs you want, but another thirty thousand sure won’t get you the 7-pack.
) And, interestingly, this also applies to certain automations that don’t scale very well:
The only exception to this rule I can think of is McDonald’s fries. The more you eat, the better they become. It is true.
2. Lesson: Don’t Do It Again
Today I learned the valuable lesson that, after 19 straight hours of working, I do not feel great.
Even as I type out this sentence, my eyes drift across the screen, my brain whirls incoherently, and I can’t find the letter “e” on my keyboard. Maybe, some would say, it is time for me to learn time management.
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