Today's quote comes from a talk about programming languages:

"If you're ever writing code to loop over the indices of an array, just assume there's a bug in it somewhere."

(In particular, we were discussing pitfalls of imperative languages, but that's not at all important to what I'm trying to talk about, so ignore this sentence if you didn't understand it.)

Okay, so it's not quite true; I've reached the point in my programming career where, upon needing to write array-indexing code, I am still forced to stop, ask myself what I want to do, and then tell the computer to do it -- but at least I usually get it right that first time. Even so, there are certainly other areas of my life where I could benefit by applying similar logic:

• If you're ever planning to be on time to a class/meeting/event, just assume that you're going to be ten minutes late.
• If you're ever planning your time around the deadline for an assignment, just assume that you're going to be working up to literally the last minute.
• If you're ever coming up with a password, encryption key, or other important string of characters to remember, just assume you're going to forget it tomorrow.
• If you're ever reading a book before bed, just assume you're going to read at least an hour later than you expected.
• If you're ever planning to take a small nap and get back to work, just assume it's not going to happen.

The common factor here seems to be "There are some things you're really chronically bad at planning; you should stop assuming that you're going to be