Ship faster
August 24, 2021

When you're doing some creative, you'd be better off shipping the first draft as quickly as possible.

If you're working in a team, your work will most definitely go through at least one round of review by your peers or a supervisor. Assuming you care about the quality of your work, you'd better the first set of critique as early as possible so you have time to iterate and make things better. This also gives you time to align your work with the person who's vision you're following.

There's another argument that applies to everyone who's creating something, regardless of whether you're working in a team or not. When you pick up something new, the initial few days is when your excitement about the vision of how the final product should look like is the highest. You're constantly thinking of ways to do things better, putting in the work to get something up, even if it's nothing substantial.

Excitement, however, is a depleting resource.

Excitement vs. Time

If you let your ideas stew without any execution or without putting out the first draft in front of the others, your excitement slowly starts to decrease — up to the point where procrastination has completely replaced any will to ship whatsoever.

Things go downhill from there. Only one of these two things can happen now:

  1. You get excited about something else and the first task you picked up stays on the back-burner. This happens to most of people's side projects.
  2. For projects that cannot be put on the back-burner forever but need to be shipped on some deadline, you still need to work. But now that your excitement is gone, you're no longer striving to do it the best. You're just trying to somehow get it done. This scenario is even worse because that's how you end up shipping sub-standard work that you're not proud of.

For most people, scenario #1 is generally acceptable. But no self-respecting creator wants to fall in #2.