Small Tech Stack logo
Small Tech Stack logo

All articles

Bike-Shedding a.k.a. The Law Of TrivialityUpdated 2 years ago

From - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

"Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task."


Here's a good example of protecting yourself from Bike-Shedding:

If I'm working on a presentation (PowerPoint, etc.), I have much better luck if I start out in a text editor until I get my content completed.  Why?  Because I know that I will "bike-shed" on the unimportant stuff like colors, fonts, and positioning.  Those things are easy and fun... and we love to do them.

So I start with text and move on to the easy stuff once that's finished. For images, I just use text placeholders such as [[schema diagram here]].



Was this article helpful?
Yes
No