The title is paraphrased from a quote that is incorrectly attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

To Cut Down a Tree in Five Minutes Spend Three Minutes Sharpening Your Axe

Anyway, what I think the quote is trying to say is, it’s okay for things to take time. That is, if you’re actively working on making the end result much better.

Since I am a world renowned champion of doing things the easy way™ but also doing things good enough™, I have found that the only reliable method for both those phrases to be true is if I take time to understand/study/figure out what the problem is 1.

Case study for this case to study (working title)

This site for instance. I want to document my writings/thoughts but do not want to spend too much time in fixing the content for each post. My initial solution involved writing in markdown first, converting this to html (via a converter) and then using templates to ensure the header and footer elements were standardised from page to page. This caused a certain amount of friction and meant I spent much less time writing and more time doing admin 2.

I also wanted a landing page to act as a place to direct people to first that needed to have a different style from the posts page. Also since I had this need to keep everything as small as possible, I decided to write the HTML and CSS from scratch and use next to no JavaScript. his was okay, since I had a snappy page, but any time I made a change or decided to incorporate or test something new, something inevitably broke 3.

The fix

Just use a CSS framework for the landing site and a static site generator geared to blogs for the posts page.

In my case this would be TailwindCSS and Hugo + Papermod. I could have saved a ton of headache earlier, by spending some time with the really well written documentation online. I was being extra lazy and thought writing ex nihilo would be easier than learning something new 4.

The exception that proves the rule

If you are a serial procrastinator, perhaps avoid doing this. You might end up sharpening your axe for much longer than necessary.  



Misc

For more information on how to get a hugo blog started up with a custom theme (specifically for cloudflare pages and github), this article is super helpful 

  1. This mostly rings true, but there are times when it is better to start doing and stop studying ↩︎

  2. This is also known in certain circles as the devil’s busywork 5 ↩︎

  3. Mostly since I would forget the duct tape code I had used to duct tape other code. ↩︎

  4. Don’t write from scratch if you can avoid it guys. Avoid NIH syndrome. ↩︎

  5. The circle I mention is currently one person as of the writing of this post, i.e. myself. ↩︎