I’ve been battling a bug in my invoicing plugin for over two months now. It’s not a major bug and it has an easy work around but I’ve been wasting time fighting it because I didn’t want to dig into the code and fix it. Tonight, I happened to have some spare time and felt like hacking some Rails code so I sat down, cracked open Emacs, got my debugger ready, and jumped in….

…15 minutes later the bug was fixed

Not two hours, not one hour. 15 minutes (technically I fixed another bug in the first five but we’ll let that one slide). This is the same bug that I’ve lost several hours to over the past two months. Sometimes I just need a kick to the head to stop procrastinating. That’s why I’m Open Sourcing a lot of my programs lately. These are great programs, many in production use already, but I’ve been procrastinating with them. I’m tired of talking about “When I release this….” and decided to just do it.

Next time you find yourself wasting time on something, think if you can fix it and never have to spend any more time on it. You might be surprised how little of an investment it might take.

Eric