Stop over-engineering things!

You’re probably over-engineering things in day-to-day tasks that cost you a lot of time and you might or might have not realised that yet. But yeah, I used to spend a lot of time doing a lot of stuff that used to cost me a lot of time when compounded.

It’s like you spend every single first 10 minutes of your day lie in even after waking up. In a week, you would’ve wasted more than 1 hour. It also applies to you doing anything.

As a software engineer, When starting out to learn to code, I always tend to write complex, useless and less readable code. It was an example that I understood that I was under-engineering my code. It resulted in burning out and losing interest in my projects thereafter.

But then I tend to continue to over-engineer my projects when I found I was under-engineering at the moment, I pretended to be a professional and over complexify simple solutions so that it looked I was doing some serious work 😂. But it turned out that I’ve been wasting time a lot and i’m spending a lot of time on the non-important work. It flipped my focus on the serious stuff. It resulted in burning out, mental exhaust, and never getting to finish my projects.

I think when coming to finding a balance between over-engineering and under-engineering, you have to put priority towards your tasks, duration and and the lifetime of the project.

Tasks

These are certain goals listed by the project that you can analyse to prioritise your focus, attention, energy and time on. This will give you much more satisfaction, and save a lot of time.

Duration

This is the duration of time you’ve to complete the project within. Let’s say you have a client that needs their work done within a week. You will prioritise giving the output much faster and efficiently done within such a short time.

Lifetime

This is meant by the duration of time that this is gonna last. Let’s say you are starting your company and you’re building a digital service. At this point you are targeting a lot of users and you need to build a service that’s functional and intuitive for the users and as well as maintainable by the software engineers in your company. This time you need to find a 50–50 balance between over-engineering and under-engineering.

These are some things that I personally use to analyse my projects. I hope these knowledge will help you analyse your projects and stuff.