It used to make me wait
A build used to have waiting in it. You typed the thing, set it going, and sat there. A compile, a file going up a line that was never quick enough, a machine that wanted the rest of the evening to put itself back together. You could not start the next bit until the last bit had finished, so you sat and looked out of the window, or made a cup of tea, and while you were doing nothing the work carried on without you.
That was where I caught things. Halfway through the wait I would remember the file I had not copied, or see that the way I had set it up would work once and be a mess the second time. The mistake was already there. The wait was the only stretch of the day long enough for me to notice it. Nothing clever in that. A slow machine made me sit with my own work.
There is no gap now. The change is made, the thing is running, and I am reading the next question before I have finished with the last answer. A whole evening can go by with nothing in it but me and the tool, and by the end something is working on the box and I have not once got up from the chair.
I would not go back. Waiting for a bad line was not character building, it was a tax, and I paid it because there was no way round it. But I got something off the back of it I did not know I was being given: a pause I did not have to organise.
So I organise it now, on purpose. A finished change does not go up the same evening. It sits until the morning, and if it is the sort of thing that matters it sits overnight, and I find out over breakfast whether I still think it is right. I go for a walk, then I make the tea I used to make while the old machine was grinding away and drink it standing in the kitchen instead of at the desk.
Most of the time nothing comes of it and the thing was fine. Now and then I come back, see the whole of it at once, and take it apart. That is the hour I used to get for free. I have to book it myself these days and I am not always good at keeping the appointment, which is a dull thing to admit at my age.
The work still gets done, and faster than it ever did. I just have to be the one who stops.