Stop Tweaking Everything.

Ever since Google killed Google Reader last year, I’ve felt uneasy about using Google’s services. That uneasiness hasn’t been enough to push me away from Gmail and Google Docs, but it did convince me to move Techinch’s RSS feed off Feedburner soon after Google Reader shut down. After all, if they killed their RSS reader, what’s to keep them from killing off their RSS syndication tool, too?

But then, sans-Feedburner, it’s next-to-impossible to know how many people are subscribing to Techinch. Maybe that’s an unimportant stat, but it’s fun to know that people are reading what you write. And so, last week, I signed up for FeedPress to get stats on Techinch’s RSS feed, among other things. That requires a little .htaccess tweaking, which is always slightly unnerving for me since I have the uncanny ability to mess something up every time I open that file, but it went fine the first time. Then, once everything looked good, I just had to get a FeedPress Premium account so I could keep everything on my domain to make moving away from FeedPress—if such a thing was ever needed—possible without any pain.

That’s when I managed to mess stuff up (and so, to everyone who subscribes via RSS, sorry if you got some random articles from a different site in your reader today. That was my fault, and it’s fixed now). I couldn’t leave good enough alone, and wait for more time to get things working.

My feed worked before, and it worked after the initial redirect to FeedPress. It would have been fine to wait. And yet, there’s this crazy, eternal drive to tweak stuff. They say plumber’s pipes always leak. For them, it might be because they’re too busy to fix their own, but for geeks, our problem is typically that we can’t leave good enough alone. All’s not well until everything’s perfect—but it should be readily apparent that there’s no such thing as perfect in a fast-changing industry like ours. You can eternally tweak, but there will always be something else to tweak.

So stop. Agile development and rapid iteration and constant progression is good, but it’s so easy to take it too far. If your Mac is working, just get your work done and don’t go trying to tweak something to make it better. Same for your site, and your to-do list, and your everything else you’re tempted to tweak with when you’re bored. When it’s time to actually improve your site, set aside a block of time to do that, and just do that. But stop with the constant tweaking. You’re only going to drive yourself mad.

Or at least I’m going to. Which is why I’m trying to stop, and thought you might do well with the reminder to do so, yourself.

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Related: Think, Then Act

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