Don't Rush Your Current Work

At work it can often feel like you need to hurry up and crank out the current piece of work. And so you think, maybe I'll just cut corners a bit. I'll just skip writing those tests. Or I'll just skip refactoring the code at the end of my red-green-refactor flow.

Don't.

Either you're working on the most important thing you could possibly be working on for the organization, or you're not, and should put it down, allowing you to pick up and work on the most important thing for the organization.

If your boss comes to you and says:

Hey, I need you to hurry up on X so we can start working on Y!

Ask them if X or Y or more valuable for the organization? If it's X, let them know you're working as fast as you can while doing the job right. If it's Y you're happy to put down what you're working on and pick up Y, because it will move the needle.

If what you're working on is the most important possible thing for the organization then rushing it and making mistakes doesn't do you, or anyone else on the team, any good and you should take the time to do it right.

Cutting corners is going to hurt the team. How depends on how well the rest of the team is doing their job. Best case it hurts you and the individual reviewing your code, because they noticed you tried to skip tests, or to not refactor, and called you on it in code review. Congratulations, you've just wasted their time, and now you have to do it right anyway. Or they do a shoddy job of reviewing and it makes it into production. There it comes back to bite you as rework. Now it costs your whole team double. You have to take the time to correct it and get it reviewed again, (hopefully more thoroughly this time) in addition to the opportunity cost of the time you lost you could have been devoting to value adding work.

If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right. So either do it right, or don't do it.