Are you too busy for quality? That was an experiment put on by the Washington Post that I was alerted to by Guy Kawasaki on Twitter. The title of the news story was Pearls Before Breakfast, and it talks about an experiment they did where they took one of the world's most renown violinists, Joshua Bell, and had him perform for an hour at a subway stop at L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, D. C. They didn't announce who he was, though. They set him up like a regular street musician with a violin case and he played some wonderfully technical and beautiful pieces. The results were staggering, and not in the positive; please go read the story.

I think it's an interesting story that can be applied to many people who work on their jobs throughout the day. I've commented on how stunned I am when I'm reading stories on CNN.com and how many spelling mistakes, or typos, I see. I can't only fault them, though, as I've had my share of typos on my blog.

The term "too busy" is bandied about so often now that it's laughable when I hear it. Folks say they're too busy to read a book, but they can spend 3 or 4 hours sitting in front of the TV watching entertainment shows or sporting events. I'm not knocking relaxation time, but what I'm getting at is that we all make the choices we do that determine what we feel is most important in our lives, and using "too busy" as an excuse is lame. What one really means to say is they're otherwise engaged; that makes more sense.

This is a pervasive problem, but it doesn't hold back progress. Microsoft is the favorite whipping boy for putting out products that have a lot of bugs, and yet we'd all be lost without it. Not all of us can get away with being like Microsoft, though.

I'm not going to drag this one further, because I really hope you read the article; it's long, but it's worth it.