I started to have some comments that with a post a week during the holidays, there was no more Friday funnies! Worst of all, because I forgot to program this post, it ends up being posted on Thursday! Oh well, could have waited 1 more day and that would have actually be a Friday funny.

Today, I wanted to tackle with a pinch of humour (that’s what I like to believe) the very important subject of waiting for the last minute to do something.

Not sure if that’s a characteristic of Murex consultants in general or of everyone (I tend to believe in the later, except that Murex consultants take it to the next level, or the boss level, or the extra hard post game level), but there’s indeed a strong habit of waiting as much as possible before doing something.

It’s a bit like driving fast up a cliff and stopping as close as possible to the gap. You might be shocked by this metaphor (seems extreme indeed to compare a daredevil stunt to writing a document) but it is spot on! Because if you don’t do it right: you will crash and burn. Especially if your estimations are off and what you assume would take 1h, takes in fact a day.

Real life example: customer calls, has a problem with a report. (it’s 10am on a Monday). He was due to deliver the report at 9am. Best of all, he pretty much had few weeks to work on it, but only started on Sunday night. Kudos for working on Sunday night, but if he had tested before, he would not have crashed and burned. (I know that I repeat myself but that’s ok because I know that I repeat myself a lot.)

Errr, moving on. The metaphor, the example they were designed to scare you. I think it’s pretty fair to say that it did not work and I know exactly the feeling: the satisfaction of having cleaned your to-do list does not bring a fraction of the motivation of a close deadline. The only thing that worked for me is to register the tasks in my to-do with a closer due date. This actually does work: the guilt of having overdue items in my to-do is really unpleasant.

And you dear reader, do you do all your tasks as they come or you live next to the coffee machine with the anxiety of not being able to finish the job that was due 2 hours ago?