Here’s the natural instinct that everyone, well, almost everyone has at some point, “I’ve just finished this big work. I need to clear my mind! So, I’ll give it to someone else to review.”
This is a natural, human thought. You do need a break. And another pair of eyes to review your work is never bad. Indeed, there is a whole occupation and industry (QA) built around doing precisely this one task. Why not ask them to do it, to help you out?
There are a few reasons to never do this.
The first is that no one will ever check it as well as you will. So, you need to check it yourself. There will be huge obvious things that are obvious to you and no one else. Other people are good for checking for details you may have missed, or perhaps even big things you missed, but not the key non-obvious mistakes. If you create a page and there is a big broken image, then anyone can catch that. But if two sections are in the opposite order of what you had intended…. how could anyone else know that? No one can read your mind.
The right use of QA, copyeditors, and other such support is the “added bonus” double-check after you’ve first checked yourself. Not the replacement.
The second reason is that checking it yourself is a good habit, and you only want to install good habits in yourself. For the same reason that cleaning up after yourself is a good habit, even if you have a housekeeper. Or not dropping your trash on the ground outside is a good habit even if there are men whose job it is to clean that up. Aristotle teaches us that “virtue is a habit” and you need to get into the virtuous habits yourself.
And in this case, it’s important to have the most virtuous habit, for three reasons: one, if you aspire to be a leader, all will follow your example. Plus, two, if you ever want to criticize someone else for having missed a mistake, you can’t live in a glass house yourself—outsourcing the review of your own work is moving into a house of the thinnest glass there is. Finally, three, if you’re a freelancer, you’re basically an outsider, so you’ll always be judged to a higher standard than the insiders.
This additional reason is more symbolic than anything else. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be the sort of person that just finishes something and then lets everyone else deal with cleaning it up? Or the person who does the cleanup himself to have a final, finished product?
Here’s a secret, to use a software developer’s old saying (okay, so if it’s an old saying, then it’s not much of a secret), “The first 80% of the time needed to develop software is spent developing the software; the second 80% is then spent fixing all the tiny little details you missed.” This is important because it is, indeed, 80% of the work to get all the little details right after your current iteration. And you can discover, pinpoint, and fix them much faster than anyone else. Doing anything else is, to skip the euphemisms, pure laziness. And if you want to be lazy, there’s no problem with that: just admit it. The problem with laziness isn’t laziness per se, it’s laziness masquerading as work.
