Sometimes many people in my life comment on my rigid behavior and attitude. This includes people in my personal life, and also my business life, like my clients. This article is in defense of that.

Programming and software development is something that really squeezes many things out of a programmer. It stresses him out, it causes tensions. It even affects him such that it is too evident by others in his other interactions as well.

But not so when things are flowing smoothly. But how does the programmer ensure his projects are going smooth and on-track, for his own sake and for the sake of his clients? It is this rigid character/attitude, or to paraphrase, it is this discipline that makes it so.

Sometimes clients are too flexible in their payment. Payment is to be this week, but they conveniently “forget”, or suddenly they are “out of town”, so they JUST can’t make the payment, and it is “evidently not their fault”, even though relevant notice and payment timeline was given amply way before.

But, as a service provider (SP), we cannot ask for such flexibility ourselves. When things gotta be done by today, things gotta be done by today. I know many SPs are not like that. They too give various excuses, littered with confusing terminologies, to the client.

But I don’t believe or like that. A word given, in personal or business life, it has to be stuck to with at least 95% sincerity, with 5% for something really beyond your control and not because of some discipline issues.

And, guess what. Clients like that of me because it delivers their product/service to them. And in timely milestone fashion too. Sometimes, to their surprise. And luckily (or not) that trait happens to be an in-built one for me.

However, it is not just a few incidents when this trait of mine had cause much irritation to people, both personal and business. Sometimes people just wanna talk and talk out of tangent, and when I bring them to alignment, for some efficiency, they get angry. Sometimes when I get DIRECT to the point, they again get angry.

I know people are people. So, over the years, I have learnt to be the listening ear that some people want me to be, and practiced patience so that I am more than just a lean, mean, to-the-point, no-nonsense service provider, and more of a human.

I hope that gets me more business that way. Ameen.

• Tags: discipline attitude