Hit 500 print files this month and still botched a simple one-color job

I started tracking my screw ups in a notebook back in January. Last week I hit number 500 and thought I'd be a pro by now. But then I sent a single color t-shirt design to the printer without double checking the black was set to 100% K instead of rich black. The client got muddy gray text on white shirts. So here's my debate: does the number of mistakes matter less than the type of mistake you keep making? Or am I just being too hard on myself because 500 is a lot of fails? Anyone else hit a milestone that made them question if they were actually learning anything?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_ben12d ago

The thing nobody is talking about is how your brain handles familiar tasks. Once you've done something 500 times, your brain starts running on autopilot. That's when the dumb mistakes happen. You're not messing up because you don't know what you're doing. You're messing up because you're too comfortable. The real problem isn't the mistake count or even the type of mistake. It's that you're not treating each job like it's your first one anymore. That gray text on white shirts happened because you assumed it would be fine without checking. So maybe 500 means you've gotten good enough to get sloppy, not that you're stuck.

thomas_johnson3512d ago

Used to think mistakes were just mistakes, you know? Like a screw up is a screw up regardless. But then I started noticing patterns in my own notebook. The repeats were the real problem, not the total count. I've got 200+ unique fails but the ones that hurt were the same registration error I made 14 times before I fixed my workflow. So 500 might just mean you're trying a lot of stuff, which is probably good.