Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.” — Mark Lawrence
As a business graduate, I was taught ways to help big companies thrive. When you are working in a big “machine” of an organization, efficiency is like hygiene in a hospital – a non-negotiable symptom of professionalism.
And while that’s valid for them, I no longer think it’s the same with independent expert service providers.
For example, some people think that adding extra time to a project is cheating. They call it “padding.” But I think it’s actually THE professional thing to do.
What would you say is more likely to look impressive to a client:
– Promising to do the work in 20 days, and finishing in time despite some unforeseen “bumps”
– Promising to do the work in 16 days, and only finishing on time by sacrificing sleep and sanity due to those same unforeseen “bumps”
The projects we get hired for are messy affairs, it’s normal for things often go wrong in unexpected ways. If dealing with that makes us “late”, that creates stress – the No.1 enemy of quality work.
By stretching to appear efficient, we weaken ourselves by losing the resources we can “sacrifice” to avoid most stress factors. I say it’s more professional to “pad” with a common-sense amount of reserve than always to offer the solution for the best-case scenario that barely exists in the real world.