Shortsightedness

Have you ever done something quick and dirty even though doing things "the right way" would only take a little more time? Maybe you didn't have a little more time? Of course. Haven't we all?

Here's an example. Recently, I was creating a conference registration form for a client on her Plone-based site. Ideally, the client would have created and maintained the registration form herself, since the tool we were using has a graphical form creation interface. However, the documentation for the tool we were using was out of date. I thought about updating the documentation at that time and then helping the client through it, but that would have required a lot more time than just setting up the form myself. Also, I was going to be out of town shortly (for the NTEN conference) and the client wanted to start accepting conference registrations as soon as possible. In the circumstances, it seemed a reasonable solution for me to create the form, so I did. Many form tweaks later, I think I have spent more time on updating the form than it would have taken to update the documentation, which could have helped others besides just this client.

I think many things in life are like sliding puzzles -- you may have to suffer temporary "setbacks" (moving blocks out of the correct positions) in order to get the optimal end result. Maybe the trick is not to think of them as setbacks but as steps toward a goal. I have started trying to be very conscious of how I do things. If it will make things better or more efficient in the future, I want to choose to spend more time up front for foundational work. It is challenging to try to work according to a long term vision rather than according to what seems most pressing at the moment.

One challenge is when your organization as a whole doesn't really support it. (Do any?) Here's what I have noticed often happens when employees want to work on improving their organization in big picture ways:

And the boss has to think about things like if grantmakers will be ok with his/her organization having less immediate results because the organization was focusing on long-term effectiveness. (Also, it may be particularly difficult for nonprofits to take "time out" to become more efficient because if they're not spending all their effort heads-down on mission work children will starve or trees will get cut down or... But what about the children etc you aren't getting to help because your organization is not efficient enough?)

Or perhaps acting with the big picture in mind doesn't lead to greater productivity and less stress as I imagine it would, because of the increased effort/costs required. What do you think? Is your organization shortsighted (not that you need to have a simple yes/no answer)? How does this impact the work that you do?

Comment from Jessica McCoy on April 25, 2007 - 1:45pm

Yeah, we have that same issue. We're so busy just keeping up with our everyday tasks that we don't take time to create patterns that would improve our workflow. It's a tough problem. I keep thinking that things will slow down a little bit, enough that I can take time to work on long-term stuff, but then things always pop up last minute.

Sorry, I don't have any ideas either about how to solve it...I've been trying to get more volunteers and interns to help with some of the more mundane tasks here to free up time for other things, but that just means I have to spend time supervising them. So it's not perfect.

 Good Luck!

Comment from cheryl jerozal on April 26, 2007 - 3:34pm

It's good to know I am not the only one who struggles with this. Maybe working with volunteers and interns will get less time-consuming as you go along? Good luck to you too!