What an amazing email from ESR.<p>I feel like I&#x27;ve had the issue he describes happen to me in multiple facets of life, at different points.<p>College? Check - There definitely was a point where I couldn&#x27;t cruise and catch up by cramming. High school was a joke in comparison with some of the learning challenges I finally encountered.<p>Task management? Hah! Todo lists are for old people. I cruised by on this one for a LONG time due to (at least my own perceived) pretty large short-medium term memory before personal life + work life (and moving up the chain) meant that there&#x27;s no way I&#x27;d remember everything that needed tending to unless I adopted some sort of system.<p>More guilty one? Tests. For better or for worse, I worked professionally in an environment where we a) had a compiler, b) had a QA group, and c) managed to put out a lot of working software without a test suite. It definitely made me finally give in to &quot;code should have at least SOME test suite, if not a pretty comprehensive one&quot; after much kicking and screaming. To this day, in my mind, I harbor feelings that it&#x27;s possible to pump out largely working (i.e. with a defect rate not much worse off than any other project, because no software is without any) software incredibly faster and make the users&#x2F;customers&#x2F;people who wanted the thing built happy WITHOUT writing tests. That said, I also know it&#x27;s completely irresponsible and not scalable to do so.