
The Shirk and Turk Principle (related to Do Things That Don't Scale) - dreeves
http://blog.beeminder.com/shirknturk/
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pjh
I have a fondness for what McKinsey called "crude instruments", something that
is almost certainly good enough, and will stop you trying to get ever more
precise data.

"A crude instrument like this is a pretty good start. It begins to shake
things up and overcome the internal inertia."
[http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/breaking_down_the_...](http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/breaking_down_the_barriers_to_corporate_resource_allocation)

There will always be an epsilon to conquer; most of them aren't worth the
effort after the first couple approximations, and I value accuracy over
precision.

"It's better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong" — Carveth Read (1920,
predates Keynesian equivalent, q.v.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carveth_Read](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carveth_Read)
)

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dreeves
Relevant Paul Graham quote:

    
    
        > Some startups could be entirely manual at first.  
        > If you can find someone with a problem that  
        > needs solving and you can solve it manually, go  
        > ahead and do that for as long as you can, and  
        > then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It  
        > would be a little frightening to be solving  
        > users’ problems in a way that wasn’t yet  
        > automatic, but less frightening than the far  
        > more common case of having something automatic  
        > that doesn’t yet solve anyone’s problems.
    

Generalizing that slighly, here’s what I call the Shirk & Turk Principle: When
writing any new app or website or feature, implement as little of it as you
can get away with and manually fake the rest behind the scenes.

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BostonEnginerd
Beeminder is one of the few applications that I've found to be quite effective
at keeping me on track to building new habits.

Thanks to Beeminder, my dental cleanings have gotten to be quite a bit more
friendly:
[https://www.beeminder.com/bostonenginerd/floss](https://www.beeminder.com/bostonenginerd/floss)

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dreeves
Woo-hoo! Thanks so much for saying so! (And I see you've passed 4 years of
beeminding recently, which is maybe an even more powerful testimonial!)

~~~
BostonEnginerd
I can't believe it's been that long! I've drifted away, but always come back
when I notice habits no longer sticking.

