Every other hex bolt

(Minor spoilers for Iron Man.)

There’s an exchange early in Iron Man (2008) that I think about a lot. Two characters must suddenly complete a long-running project and time is running out:

Stark: Come over here and button me up.
Yinsen: Okay. All right.
Stark: Every other hex bolt.
Yinsen: They’re coming!
Stark: Nothing pretty, just get it done.

Here Stark is telling Yinsen there is only time to focus on the critical pieces of the project. Don’t waste time.

“Wasting time” could be the name of my autobiography. So I think to myself ‘Every other hex bolt’ whenever I’m coding something up and I start futzing with spacing in comments. Or tweaking and fiddling with slides. You know, procrastinating ¹.

Figures for me are a huge bugbear—I would become obsessed over all sorts of minor aspects of a figure: aligning subplots, matching font sizes, designing color schemes, rearranging legends, you name it. And while I think good, effective visualizations are critical to science, the software now takes care of so much, and the difference between a ‘Nothing pretty’ figure and a figure I spent 5 hours grinding away at is almost imperceptible to anyone but myself. So don’t waste time.

Every other hex bolt.

See also

• ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good’
• Gilding the lily
• ‘Worse is better’
• Satisficing
• “Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes” —Robert Watson-Watt