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Ben Sinclair
Ben Sinclair

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What's the most inefficient thing you do?

We all have weird things we do, long ways around short problems. We should probably get around to sorting them out, but we've gotten used to That Way Of Doing Them.

Sometimes we've created monster workflows that Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson would eye suspiciously before backing away from. Sometimes we hold onto them because they're comfortable, sometimes because fixing them seems too difficult, sometimes just because we don't know any better until it's way too late to make any difference.

What do you do that fits this description? Well, what are you vaguely embarrassed to admit to, anyway?

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Cover image by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash.

Top comments (10)

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bvisonl profile image
Benjamín Visón

Sadly being a pretty good procrastinator

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drbearhands profile image
DrBearhands

Back in university I was tinkering around with Unreal Development Kit for fun, I was making a framework for RTS games. UnrealScript had delegates. I'd just finished functional programming 101. Everything must be delegates! After stacking delegates on delegates I got the language to tell me 1+1=0.

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Björn Grunde

No matter language, I always seem to find the slowest way of debugging.
Luckily there always seems to be a rockstar around the corner that senses something is wrong and takes their time to show me the fastest way. I never figure it out myself tho, I'm just going with the flow.

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tyrannaut profile image
Tim Ryan

Great question, but I'm struggling to come up with an answer. I think it's rare to choose the long way of doing something if you know a better, faster way exists. I'm sure I have plenty, but I'm almost certain they'd be in my blindspot.

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henrym2 profile image
Matthew Henry

For me the absolute worst is probably writing out really long commands by hand instead of just taking the 5 seconds to write an alias for them

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scrabill profile image
Shannon Crabill

I manually type 'git clone REPO', then 'cd' into the folder when I am sure there is a way to automate it. I like having the muscle memory.

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vgrovestine profile image
Vincent Grovestine

I walk to the far end of town to buy coffee when there's a perfectly usable coffee machine less than 10 feet away from my desk. That counts as inefficient, right?! :)

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

Well that counts as sensible if the coffee machine is anything like the one in my office!

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Dan Silcox

Reverting to MS excel to do things like ‘text to columns’ instead of writing a little re-usable script for it

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Tracy Adams

For me, its my overthinking. When I get a new task, at the end I always regret thinking so much on it.