Motion vs Action
There is a great old quote, “Never confuse motion with action”, closely related to the euphemism, “spinning your wheels” that I try to remember. Stuck in slow moving traffic on the interstate is frustrating and very tempting to take the next exit and go the long way around. That almost always takes longer but it feels better to be moving.
Sitting in one spot with a GNSS receiver, waiting on a tough shot to resolve itself is much like that. I could go out in the wide open, set a pair of control points, get the robot, set it up, shoot the backsight, walk or traverse in to the monument and shoot it in 0.02 seconds. Bang…just like that. With traditional surveying, there is always positive forward motion (and back, and forth, and back, and forth), but always motion, that indicates progress. Waiting is difficult to do when one is used to constant motion.
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Like most things there are competing values, the long way can be more pleasant and the extra work of setting a pair while may not or may not be the efficient it may very well be an assured outcome. My GPS experience is before all these new fangled boxes that can allegedly work under heavy canopy and most of the time I have spent waiting and hoping has been wasted.
In the woods sometimes I cut along the property lines if it is a toss up with running a random line, at least then I may stumble upon evidence and the concerned parties can find their monuments.
“Do something even if it’s wrong” is another quote from an old party chief of mine, and not without merit.
All kinds of little philosophical questions arise in the pathways of efficiency and effort.
“Never confuse activity with progress.”
Yes sir!
😉
N
It was a long tough week so with today being a day of rest I am striving to have as little motion, progress, activity or action as possible.
Party Chef
“Do something even it it is wrong”?
I would fire that old party chief who practiced that quote.
Perhaps the spirit of the phrase could use a little hashing out, in the context of the OP it would be that if you hop out and set a pair of GPS points in open sky and traverse into the canopy you may be spending more time overall than waiting for the resolution but you will for sure have done something where as waiting on the engines to crunch you may be assed out regardless.
Another example is going with some solution that is pending, say accepting or setting corners where there is some further analysis or research needed to be 100%. There are some who will do nothing until all is resolved, but sometimes, in my opinion, it is just as well to stake what you got, explain to whomever that it is pending and gamble that your intuition is correct.
I am all for planning and analysis, in fact I think the front end investment of time is the most important part of good surveying, but, sometimes you have to hop out and engage the world and in so doing start the troubleshooting in motion and hopefully progress.
“Do something even it it is wrong”?
A related thought is “A good plan acted on now is better than a perfect plan an hour from now.”
A related thought is “A good plan acted on now is better than a perfect plan an hour from now.”
I liked that. Though there’s a litany of axioms that get bandied about and you hear them and take them with a grain of salt, because after all, it’s just sayin’ sh@t, and there’s everything that gets said and everything that gets done.
If there were some sayin’ sh@t that seems to span the subject of surveying, it would be some old saying about ‘No plan survives the first contact with the enemy’ , and to touch on Party Chef’s ‘Do something, even if it’s wrong’ is just a ‘Head in the game’ banter, because when all is said and done, it’s just the two (or three) of you, and no one else, so you try and do your part, take the slack off the next guy when you can, and think it through with the experience you have.
It’s possible to sit there in the woods for fifteen or twenty minutes trying to get a GNSS solution, but was it the GNSS solution ???
Is it in your budget to go back for another fifteen minutes to find out whether the position is repeatable ??
The major difference is between “good plan” as opposed to “wrong”.
I’ve no problem with acting on a “good plan” now.
I do have a problem with the idea of doing something while knowing it is “wrong”. That is well………wrong and I have heard others through the years echoing that.
A related thought is “A good plan acted on now is better than a perfect plan an hour from now.”
The version I heard was one that my cousin learned in Marine OCS: “An adequate plan initiated right now, suddenly and violently, is always preferred to waiting for a better plan”.
Do something even if it is wrong. We do that all the time. Not every signal results in finding the true corner monument. Not every shot is correct. But, we eliminate the confusion by eliminating each wrong answer.
Or, Plans are to get your feet moving, not tie your hands.
“Do something even if it is wrong.”
Heard that from mentors and said that many times to helpers that always found a way to stay idle as soon as you turn your attention to your job and are not monitoring their activity at work.
Letting them know that they are not going to learn by being told what to do all the time and that they should begin to see what needs to be done and do it by their own choice without assistance.
Not all learning is from doing something the right way. When you do something wrong and can see how it is wrong, a person has the opportunity to learn from it or let the act defeat them.
A part of culling the herd…………
The version of the quote I heard was attributed to Patton and went “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow”
I’ve always thought that waiting for a GPS receiver to hopefully initialize correctly in a bad environment was another definition of insanity, unless the nearest clearing I could set points in was farther than it made sense to cut line and traverse. For sure if the point in question is a property corner it needs to be shot more than once and under different conditions before I’m going to trust it.
“Motion can be attained in a hammock.” – D. MacIsaac
—Dan MacIsaac, PLS
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