Painting is such a good example, and is one of the closest analogies to programming. You can do it fast and it’ll be done but you probably won’t like it. Or you can prep for it and it’ll take 10x longer, you won’t see anything for 90% of the time and it’ll be done in the blink of an eye.
At work I got asked for a feature a while back. We tee shirt size estimates and I said it was an XL. I came back a week later at our next planning sync and said I was going to work on it that day and we’d have it tomorrow. PM was very confused and worried about committing to an XL task in 24 hours - but I’d spent probably 3 days of the last week planning, doing requirements, writing up a spec sheet, weighing up against alternatives etc, and came up with the “simple solution” that we could smash out in a few hours. All of that time was “doing the thing”.
(Well, most of it. Some of it was just naval gazing and wondering if it really could be that simple…)
At work I got asked for a feature a while back. We tee shirt size estimates and I said it was an XL. I came back a week later at our next planning sync and said I was going to work on it that day and we’d have it tomorrow. PM was very confused and worried about committing to an XL task in 24 hours - but I’d spent probably 3 days of the last week planning, doing requirements, writing up a spec sheet, weighing up against alternatives etc, and came up with the “simple solution” that we could smash out in a few hours. All of that time was “doing the thing”.
(Well, most of it. Some of it was just naval gazing and wondering if it really could be that simple…)