Is It Worth the Time? linked on Astoundingly useful programming tools
The fact that someone actually made this chart up is funny, but in fact it’s quite useful. Douglas Adams’s quote about spending a full day writing a program to save ten seconds notwithstanding (see the book), writing a program almost always takes longer than performing the task once. The issue is, will writing the program save time over the long run?
If you perform a task five times a day, and you manage to shave ten seconds off of it, that’s worth spending a day or two of programming, at least if you’re going to be performing the task for five years or more. Back when I had a nine-to-five (well, technically, seven-to-three) job, I kept this chart posted on my wall next to the computer.
There were times when wasting the ten seconds is so easy, and writing the program was so uninteresting, that I didn’t feel like writing the program; this chart helped motivate me. And there were times when the savings were low but the program interesting, and the chart helped convince me not to waste the University’s time.
Now that I’m programming for myself, of course, interesting holds more importance.
