Employers have very high expectations of their employees and will rarely stop to ask how you’re doing with your workload. I’ve been fortunate to have some really great managers who care deeply about their employees, but I’ve also had employers that are only concerned with output (quantity). Whenever I’ve been in a role where I’ve been successful, it’s always been where I’ve been given the opportunity to work at my own pace.

My natural pace of work is slow. Like, agonizingly slow sometimes. But, it’s thorough. Reading this, my wife would call bullshit, because I’m anything but thorough in my day-to-day life, but it’s true. If I’m writing code, I’m also writing documentation. If I’m building a lab, I’m testing it from every possible direction, finding issues and working to fix them. If I’m designing a technical solution, it almost always comes with scaling, failover, backup, monitoring, and alerting solutions, rather than just a quick “make this work”.

I focus on quality output, which means that a lot of my solutions remain in prod for a long time. This is why I’m giving myself 3-5 years to the first dollar for $COMPANY. I could certainly pull in some funding from some friends, rush a methodology out the door, and make some reasonable money within a year, but I don’t believe that this will set me up with the solid footing that I want for my company. I want to focus on building a high quality base, have strong tech, strong underlying knowledge, great partners, and have myself mentally, financially, and physically ready to do the job that I’m intending to do. In order to do that, I must work slow. Kaizen. 1% improvement each day.

The hour or so a day that I spend on $COMPANY is usually the most productive part of my day. There’s no one begging for my time and nothing but a single, small task in front of me. I’ve split up what needs to be done for the company into very small tasks that I can complete within an hour. For bigger tasks such as Research: Endometriosis, TLR4, IAQ Link, I’ll have lots of research hours which will eventually complete the task at hand.

The only thing I want to show myself at the end of these micro-sprints is that I’ve moved forward in even the smallest amount, that is success to me.

Today, that task was writing this post about producing Good Work and what that means to me. Not because you need to read it, but because I needed to write it. Tomorrow, well tomorrow is Saturday, so I don’t plan on doing anything but being with my family.

Be slow. Do good work. Be a good person.

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