On Doing Things Fast

Today in my Database class was group project assignments! Rather, assignment of the group for the project. I'm super happy with the people I'm with, as at least one of them is somebody I've identified as the same caliber of programmer I aspire to be. Without having actually seen any of his group work, and based only on having been in class together, I have a great deal of respect for the way this individual interacts with people, and I'm looking forward to have them in my group.

But once we had grouped up, I noticed something interesting... First step of any group project is, of course, exchanging contact info. We all wrote down names, phone numbers, and emails on a piece of paper, and this specific individual offered to send out an email to all of us with all of the information, making sure that everyone had it, and nobody could lose it. The email was roughly formatted like so:


Name: Someones Name
Phone: 555-555-5555
Email: someones@email.com


Name: Another Name
Phone: 444-444-4444
Email: another@email.com


Name: One More Name
Phone: 333-333-3333
Email: 1more@email.com



So I watched, intrigued, as this person went through and laboriously typed out four times "Name:"... "Phone:"... "Email"... and so on. I was astounded by the inefficiency of the system. Surely, a programmer would recognize an extendible template? Even to give you the example above, I typed out:


Name:
Phone: --
Email: @


Thus enabling me to copypaste four times, and quickly and easily add in the only changing information, while preserving the duplicated formatting.

But the point of this post is, this habit of mine is so ingrained that, while I would never have given the use of it a second passing though, the ABSENCE of this efficiency mechanism resulted in quite the surprise. It took probably twice as long to produce this formatted email as it might have, and made me aware of actions I make myself and take for granted.

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT:

• Think about things as you do them. What are some efficiency mechanisms you forget you use?
• Think about areas where you COULD improve what you are doing. How would you do it?

Post your findings in the comments if you like... Teamwork is good =)