We love shortcuts, a lot. In our daily lives, we are prone to taking shortcuts, and many of them backfire on us too. Well, if you think it is beneficial to you, then why not? I do take shortcuts too, in many cases, but if I can sense possible trouble then it's always been avoided.
Sometimes, we mix the concept of taking shortcuts with smart work. The idea of doing something smartly is also a way to minimize the workload, doing things more efficiently with leadership. Taking uncalculated risky shortcuts mostly leads to problems, so we gotta be clear on this.
Lemme tell you the story of how a shortcut to save five minutes ate two hours and my workflow altogether.
I had dual-boot on my PC for a specific reason even after using a Virtual Box. I don't need dual boot so what I did was that I just deleted the partition with one click, I thought it would simply erase everything. But, I was wrong, there is a GRUB loader to boot into Kali or Windows while starting. All the files are gone but the Bootloader is still working, it tries to boot from Kali first and then gives the option to boot into Windows from there, which was gone unexpectedly. I can't even access the BIOS nor can I select anything else. The common fix for this problem from YouTube wasn't working either. After 30 minutes of this, I got the idea of accessing BIOS/CMD via a bootable CD/USB which we use during a Windows installation. So it took an hour to manage that USB and was able to fix it through cmd.
See, I could have removed that dual boot system properly within five minutes, but I had chosen to take a shortcut without any idea or without calculating the risk. Through this action, my windows could have been corrupted entirely and created a great mess for me. This wasn't an example of smart work to save time but rather a foolish move that backfired me. Ate two hours of mine, which broke the rhythm of my workflow. This is how the tendency to take shortcuts in the hope of smart work turns out to be a foolish move.
Well, it did teach me some lessons as well, lol. Gave me a glance of what could happen if I just do whatever my fingers itch for without having an idea or second thoughts. Also, it sharpened my troubleshooting concepts a little more, I had never tried these features nor was familiar with them. I kept digging through Google and Reddit forums, watched a few YouTube videos, explored related problems, and found out the solution that applied to me.
Peace!