Another extension of the hypothesis-approach is to always try to answer your question yourself before seeking help. This makes you a fantastic employee because:

1. You reserve for others only those questions that are truly challenging enough to deserve their attention
2. No one else is your bottleneck
3. It’s a way to distinguish yourself in the workplace

Not to mention, it turns out Google (and StackExchange and Quora) can answer almost anything. The downside is that you might spend hours figuring out something that someone else could do in a few minutes.

One of my major weaknesses, and something I’m always proactively combating, is a difficulty “letting go.” I’m a perfectionist and I tend to believe only I can do something the way I want. Especially when it comes to programming I tend to sink days into a problem. Now this is compounded by two additional, intertwined problems:

1) I’ve heard enough anecdotal evidence about the non-premium segments of the outsourced development market to want to lean towards hiring only premium talent…(note, matrix below not comprehensive)

2) …but I don’t have an endless budget to pay for premium talent, especially because several of my problems might be really easily resolved (a missing “ mark)

But recognizing the inefficiency, I’ve started outsourcing some tasks. What helped me most in letting go is to put it in perspective. For me this means:

• Staring at the longer term roadmap — I divide my weeks into days of coding vs. days of business development, and in a coding day, it’s easy to think I have lots of time to finish. The longer term roadmap with deadlines that I don’t want to miss reminds me to move faster
• Watching an experienced developer doing something I did in 1/10th the time — I sometimes go to pair programming Meetups and ask someone to help me replicate something I know how to do, just to realize how slow I am

Note it’s also interesting that many traditional tips didn’t help me “let her go.” For example, I know I shouldn’t expect perfection, and that I should stick to my timeline, and just deploy if the product is 80% done. But there is something about blasting a mailing list with hundreds of people with something incomplete… especially if the missing 20% seems fairly obvious… I’m going to work on this, and perhaps come back with more tips.