Clean As You Go
Because life is messy.
Cooking is messy. Grab some utensils and ingredients, scoop, measure, pour, spill, shake, mix, and stir your way to a war zone. Smart cooks realize that waiting until the job is done to start cleaning up might not be the best approach.
Cleaning as you go means you do some work, make a little bit of a mess, and clean up the mess before you take the next step. That way, you never have a huge mess. You have a clean workspace. You’re less likely to make a mistake. Because you removed some noise, it’s easier to focus on the signal.
BUT I DON’T COOK, you stammer, slobbering all over yourself. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ME?
- If you work in an office, clean your desk before you leave at the end of the day. Throw away your trash. Wash and put away your coffee mugs.
- If you drive a car, throw out the fast food wrappers when you get to the gym. You fucking slob. (I’m sorry. Someone had to say it.)
- If you’re walking down the street and a plastic bag tumbles by, ignore the risk of contracting hepatitis and pick it up and put it in the nearest trashcan.
- If you have a computer, delete all that crap on your desktop. It’s embarrassing.
There are other principles similar to “clean as you go”.
Broken window syndrome is when there’s an abandonedish house with a bunch of broken windows. The windows didn’t all get broken at the same time. A house with a broken window has ceased to become a house: it’s now a target. This is a simple feedback loop: the perception is that no one cares about the house with a broken window, so it’s OK to break another window.
Good software developers refactor their code. Refactoring is the process of improving the design of code without changing its behavior. Simply renaming something to make its purpose clearer is refactoring. Extracting code into something smaller or more generalized and more reusable is refactoring. Even things like removing/adding/cleaning up whitespace and removing commented/unused code is refactoring. It makes a huge difference over not-that-much time, and is one of those things that gets harder and more expensive to do the longer you wait.
So do yourself a favor, and clean as you go. No matter what you’re doing.
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