| Hi ahoyhere, Thanks for the great feedback - and great blog entries. I see where you're coming from especially if the guilt makes you avoid working on your startup. For me, it's not so much as guilt. It's more about a question of focus. How does one consider an open-ended task done? Is it when it is at a quality we are satisfied with? If my startup has 100 bugs, can I say it is finished? I guess it'll depend on the bugs, priority, importance of these bugs and what type of product it is. Early adopters are probably also more forgiving of using a buggy system, so it's probably ok to ship with known bugs. The problem with time boxing is we allocate fixed amount of time to work on something, but if the time elapses and the task isn't finished, we're likely to schedule more time at it. The problem is without proper focus (maybe being conscious of some reward or penalty) if we're late, we might continue the blow out. You're right though, as everyone around us is on our back, we don't need us to get on our own backs too! So perhaps, it isn't a black/white situation, but case-by-case instead. Thoughts? dave |
But I'm in the corner for shipping earlier. For our app, Freckle Time Tracking, we got the time entry interactions really, really done well, but the rest was very beta/alpha. We decided that we wanted to focus on the single biggest, most important interaction. We're still polishing the rest.
It is, of course, an unending task, but you have to use logic & foresight to decide where the intermittent goal posts are.
Creating a punishment for yourself for going over a timebox is not gonna do that hard, human thinking for you :)