Time-Quality Trade-Off - Find Your Equilibrium | post 25
For the best quality, you need many resources. Of course, your time is the main ingredient. But you must not pursue perfectionism. Because your time investment might become impractical. And any delays could increase your cost.
Or, your reliability and professional reputation might go down the sink. So, with an upcoming wallpaper-like image, let us explore the aspects of quality and time.
Key Takeaways: The concept of quality is more like a psychological variable. But the technical quality standards are driven by statistics and experiments. Also, you cannot "control" time.
Your sense of Quality has different aspects. And you can measure only a few of those quality metrics. Because subjectivity and individual beliefs affect your standards of quality.
Of course, you cannot count, measure and predict every factor of reality. And the same holds true for your productivity.
So, this article tries to explore the pros and cons of using your time for certain quality confidence.
Only Twenty Four Hours Are At Your Disposal
As you know, each day is twenty-four hours long for you. Yes, it is not that precise. With the sun movements, this duration varies throughout the year. But as far as your clock is concerned, 24 hours is your daily budget of time.
See: Ideas can come from anywhere at any time
And then, your team size affects it all. The management of the work matters. So does the Quality Assurance measures. A few people working on a project means heavy-lifting by every member.
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| Photo by Murray Campbell on Unsplash [compressed] |
Capacity is finite. Sure, you can try multi-tasking.
But most ideas which start with 'multi', are good for the machines and the computers. Humans can go crazy if someone forces them for multi-tasking and unstable workflows.
Not to mention, the era of Robotics is not going to be a painless peaceful change.
The world demands on-time delivery. Stand in front of a mirror. And ask thyself. Will you like any late delivery?
Let 'quality' be a function. The variables would be Details and Accuracy. The realistic margins are crucial here. Spend too much time for them, and guess what: the deadlines will laugh at you. Not funny. Not at all pleasant.
New: Writing heals you
In short, the 'quality' should include the Delivery Time as well.
Perfectionism has risks. Many of them will slow you down. But its pursuit is not bad itself. If something excellent can be achieved, the efforts are well worth it.
The inverse is also true.
No excellent results mean the Perfectionist process is harming you. Your time and production costs are not investments, but a self-destructive campaign.
No sales mean no profits. It means 'perfectionism' equals insanity. The process becomes self-defeating as the sole reason for creation fails. No profits mean the business model is not going to survive long.
Nobody will dare to laugh at a respectable work ethic.
But is it valuable to anyone?
When you are creating something, you tend to seek satisfaction in the process as well. If the process itself is too mechanistic, the meaning will be lost, sooner or later.
Also: Separate your satisfaction from the immediate external events
We, humans, are wired for detecting superficiality, after all.
There is something coming from within. It warns us against the shallow, the meaningless and the empty. All spiritual, scientific, philosophical as well as professional belief systems, are grounded in the attempts by our ancestors.
They tried to make some sense of the world and its recurring themes.
The great literature is often under-rated. It's eating dust on the shelves... shelves in the libraries of the empty chairs. Reading and just finding something read-worthy might have become way more difficult.
This time is of almost similar looking content.
Let's not forget: all reviews may not be just biased, but actually 'dishonest' attempts for boosting the so-called ratings. Paid reviews are real phenomena. It is a huge industry. Those reviews don't tell you whether the content is generic. Or cliched.
Note that all the time-consuming activities don't always smell vibrant or unique.
Not by any misfortune or coincidence, there exists a world that consumes a lot of your time. The web has the most energetic individuals, who repost the pointless illusions. In short, not every activity that makes you invest a lot of time is of any value or quality.
When the young read less, the old people suffer. Why? Because the energetic humans have chosen to live in the worlds of the hollow dreams and fictional characters. Self-gratification has won and the life goals are secondary to such crowd.
A high score in a video game might be valued more than a job or an entrepreneurial initiative.
The correlation between advanced college degrees, unpaid educational loans and unemployed youngsters might be hiding something more sinister within our respective cultures.
As we know what becomes of all the debates, disagreements, blame-games and headlines during such discussions; the ultimate conclusion is common to us all, irrespective of our flags, colours, languages or demographic variables...
Nobody is coming to save you or me; we are on our own, and this time, we ought to keep reading, not for some standardised one-size-fits-all exam... not for impressing the society, but for our own financial survival. Keep learning; we are truly alone and responsible for our future.
While it may seem too dystopian or pessimistic, this author believes that our current circumstances might have been inevitable, if not highly predictable, since a long time ago.
And that may or may not be - just a hunch.
For now, whenever you have to compromise between time and quality, use the Long-term Value of the end outcomes as your guiding light. High scores in video games, in a Good Quality video game, won't do you much good in your finances.
Other time-taking activities might prevent you from enjoying your life.
Filling a gazillion forms or writing a ton of reports, won't help either. Increasing the number of meetings or the work hours don't translate to quality improvement automatically.
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Ideas about self-discovery through creative activities as well as an accelerated systemic shift towards Industry 5.0 are explored on SummaryMaster51v.
Less serious or a more generic set of articles or small posts, about the daily nuances and the sudden bursts of inexperienced poetry... or an unexpected impulse of the thought leadership might be found on this blog by me.
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