mas·sive ag·gres·sive

Here's the deal: Half-assing something is a waste of everyone's time. I'm here to tell you why. 

Half-assing a project, whether it be a school assignment, a project at work, or simply cleaning out the rain gutters on the side of your house, is about the worst thing you could possibly do. You are going to create more work for yourself. You are going to have to redo it next time around. You are going to waste time. I'll tell you from personal experience that doing this makes me settle for about a 7 out of a 10 on the correctness scale. Here's a story why I know this to be true.

At a previous job, I was to implement an integration system. I was asked to tie our database in with another database, so that we could send information back and forth and keep the two systems in sync with one another. When I sat down to design how I was going to implement this, I realized I didn't have a solid understanding of how our database was designed. I asked my boss for clarification and he helped me out greatly. I also wanted to see where my piece fit in the puzzle, so I asked for a design document. I didn't realize it until the end of the project that my piece was 80% of the design. No one informed me of this and after asking a few times for the design doc, I said screw it and winged my part. I still did my design and tried to follow it the best I could but my part was GREATLY affected by the lack of overall design. My simple wing-it technique produced something that was about a 7 on my scale.

In this story, there were a couple of things that could have greatly helped me. I could have been told upfront that my part was a majority of the puzzle. At that point, I would have documented my part much more than I did. I made the assumption that my part was not a big piece and I didn't do a good job of making sure it was 100%.

Here's where I wasted other people's time. I could have designed it better and documented it more clearly. This would allow someone else to come along and tweak it much quicker, more stably, and with less effort than what would be needed to change it in its current state. I just made someone waste quite a few hours to fix something I should have done right in the first place. If I would have done it right, they wouldn't need to waste time to do it right.