You are going to spend thousands of hours working over the course of your career. Since you are investing so much of your life, you want to make sure you are as productive as possible. The crazy thing is, despite all the time you’ve spent practicing your craft, you might still be working in one of the slowest possible ways.

To discover how we can become more efficient, first we must go back to school. We need to learn about pottery. Actually, we need to learn about learning about pottery.

Once upon a time…

A friend of mine told me of a pottery teacher who decided to conduct an experiment.

At the beginning of the year, the teacher divided her class into two groups. She asked the students in the first group to create a masterpiece. With the second group, she told them to create as many pieces as possible.

Classic quality vs quantity.

For the entire year the first group continued to work on their single pottery piece. Meanwhile, the students in the second group continued to work on growing their pottery mountains.

Finally, it was the last day of class. The students in the first group were just applying their finishing touches as the students in the second were scrambling to crank out their last piece.

Presentation time!

The professor asked the first group to show off their masterpieces. They went to the front to present their works of art which were nothing short of beautiful.

Now, the second group.

They were asked to show one of their first pieces. They went up front, just like the first group, and presented something that looked more like a dumpling than any sort of pot. They continued by presenting pieces from the end of each week of class.

Halfway up the mountain the pieces were starting to take on a nice shape as the student’s technique was improving. In fact, the pieces continued to get better as they moved up their piles.

The best should always be saved for last so the students ended by showing the pot they finished on the final day of class. The quality of these pieces was truly amazing. Far better than the masterpieces from the first group.

How is this possible?

The professor concluded that by creating so many pots, the second group was allowed to make more mistakes. The students were able learn from them and their technique improved faster.

Hardware vs Software

Why do we care so much about pottery?

The same principal of making mistakes can be applied to developing software. By building many small apps we can perfect all of the things that our projects have in common.

Just like pottery, many apps, even ones that appear very different, have a lot in common. Unlike pottery, we can create libraries for some of the common things. This saves you from needing to re-implement common code in each app. Not only that, it also cuts down on the amount of testing you need to do.

So, how do we put this to the test ourselves? Easy, just follow these simple steps.

1. Think of a small app that you want to build.

   • Try to pick something small enough to build in 3 - 5 days.

2. Build it.

   • If it is taking longer than two weeks, press pause and try a smaller app.
   • If it takes 6 - 7 days to finish, try a similarly sized app next and see if you can finish it in 5 days or less.
   • If it takes more than a week, try a smaller app next time.
3. Repeat.

After you’ve built a few small apps, you can start to work on larger and larger apps. You can also adjust the target build times to meet your specific goals and schedule.

Play around with it, experiment, and have fun!

I will be putting this to the test myself and posting my progress to this blog. Make sure to subscribe so you get all the updates.

Let me know in the comments how this has worked for you!