Getting It Right the First Time

I am "scurrying around" today, amidst my observation of Ash Wednesday, preparing my home to receive my mother and my 18 month old nephew, who will be visiting with me for the next two weeks. In anticipation of some scheduling irregularities, I've been trying to not only clean my house to meet the "mom" test, but also to take care of some web site related work.

The thing that has occurred to me today is that when I get in this "get everything done NOW" mode, I tend to make way too many mistakes. A mundane example of this is the rice I put on the stove, to prepare for dinner (planning ahead) - someone forgot to set the timer and then popped over to her MacBook to do some stuff. Thankfully, the good news is that I didn't burn the house down, but the bad news is that the rice is rather "toasted" and had to be started again from scratch.

Every time I hit the "send" button prior to proofing an email, every time I publish a page of my web site without double checking it, every time I blog without re-reading through my thoughts, I get burned worse than that rice. I need to constantly remind myself that time spent checking my work is a good investment - when I don't check I frequently have to re-do, thus resulting in a waste of my time and perhaps a bad impression of my work quality for others.

How many times I have to learn this lesson before it sinks in remains uncertain, but today, I've been reminded.