Back when I first started writing software as a job, I would often say that you can’t know how long something is going to take because, well, part of writing software is figuring it out. I thought of setting due dates as walking into a dark tunnel with a blindfold on and being asked the length of the tunnel. But it doesn’t feel that way anymore. It feels a lot closer to cooking a dish where you have a sense of the end result, but also you have guests coming over for dinner in an hour so you should really start cooking and adjust as you go along.

Having a due date for shipping software used to cause me quite a bit of stress! How could I know how long something is going to take? On occasion it still does, but over time it’s become far more freeing to have a due date. Without them, decision points become much more difficult. Should X feature be included in the project? Maybe, there’s time to do it.

Due dates are just one example, but the broader principle I’ve come to adopt in building something is that constraints, like due dates, are a really good thing! Our society and culture (at least in the United States) doesn’t treat it that way, often considering “more” as inherently better. It seems especially prevalent in building tech companies where having more growth is regarded as more successful.

However when it comes to building rethink, we embrace constraints. One practical example is that we’re building it in the time we have outside of our jobs. It would be great to work on it full-time, but at the moment it’s part time and that has some really great qualities to it. Limited time (fortunately we have family and friends that we want to allocate time towards as well!) forces us to be very thoughtful about what we build and why. It means we must be decisive, not letting decision points drag on. It naturally provides us regular points to stop, think, and reflect about the problems we hear folks saying.

The one aspect I appreciate the most about having time constraints is that the six days a week I spend roughly 1.5 hours working, I get to go into that limited time with a mindset of constraints. I will often ask myself, “I have about 1.5 hours right now, what’s one thing I can accomplish and what would it mean to do that one thing well.” Over the months we’ve spent building, it’s been surprisingly gratifying to take that 1.5 hours each day, lay down one brick, and make sure that one brick was laid down very well.

So while you may feel like having more of something is better, more time, more money, more anything, try to find the silver lining in your constraints and embrace them. You may find that they’re far more useful in your work and in the end, the results of working within those constraints is far more gratifying.