If it hurts, do it more often*

*At least for things that you should be doing anyway. Don't go stubbing your toe every hour ;)

This is quite obvious in some areas. If you go for a run once a month, you'll be sore for days afterward, but if you go for a run every other day, you'll do just fine. Or, as I try to tell my kids, tidying up once a day is no big deal versus letting the mess pile up for weeks.

In software engineering, releasing a new version to customers once every six months is a big, fraught, painful process where everything has to go right. With continuous deployment, releasing six times per day is a non-event.

The same is true for many things at many scales:

• Integrating your code changes with those of your colleagues. It's a big pain with lots of conflicts to resolve if done every few days and it's a trivial exercise if it's done hourly.

• Annual planning. So much uncertainty, so much handwringing about which of the many possible futures will come to pass. Much easier to keep the detailed planning for the shorter timescales, in the spirit of Lean and Agile.

• Going meta: Writing a long monthly or even just weekly newsletter is a dreadful thought. It better be of the highest quality, jam-packed with top-notch insight, with a carefully chosen topic. Writing every day takes all that hassle and pressure off.

In a way, this is a corollary of the idea of Exponential Shrinking. If you can get away with something much smaller, do that. If the overall quantity can't be reduced, slice it up and deliver more frequently.

What's something painful or annoying that you ought to do? What would happen if you upped the frequency?