Without time you cannot create anything, let alone anything with good quality. In order to create quality, you need enough time. Not only do you need to have enough time, but you have to use the time you have correctly. Often that means focusing entirely on the task at hand. You could in fact call such a focused period of time Quality Time.

Lack of time can be real, self-inflicted or even imagined. There's not much you can do when you really don't have enough time. You have to give up on at least part of the task. The sooner you realize that the better it is for your stress levels. Even if a pregnant woman can deliver a baby in nine months, nine pregnant women can't deliver even one baby in a month, let alone nine babies! But they can deliver nine babies in nine months. If you know the amount of real time you really have, you're much better off than those who think they do.

Self-inflicted lack of time means random deadlines set by project managers, shortchanging quality for time in the short-term and other behavior, which create a real lack of time out of thin air. With a too tight schedule you might be tempted to take shortcuts thus making the eventual trip longer than necessary with all the rework. The nasty thing is that once you step on the low road and paint yourself in a corner, you really do have too little time to finish properly. There's no magical cure for it.

As we've seen, some people equate busyness with importance and therefore might want to look busy. By involving themselves in all kinds of tasks they spread themselves too thin until they have too many tasks to complete in the time they have. This kind of self-inflicted busyness can turn into a real lack of time and lead to sloppy completion of tasks or total incapability to finish anything.

If everybody around you seems busy, for real or seeking importance, the busyness can infect you, too. This kind of lack of time is totally imagined but isn't in any way less damaging to the quality of your work. Having too little time, or thinking you have too little time, causes you to complete things "with your left hand" or "just throw something together". The results are far from good quality.

All this talk about time might lead you to the conclusion that quality always takes a lot of time. That's not at all the case. Sometimes even a little time is enough, as long as it is Quality Time. Time-wise, avoiding rework is a feasible thing. That means that if you can finish something properly, do it, instead of waiting for somebody to complain and then redoing it. You can't store time but you can spend it wisely. All that can be expressed in the Single Subject's Swifter Slogan:

Quality Time spent is real time saved.

Quality Time enables creating good quality, but doesn't guarantee it. You need something else, too.

The conclusion of Chapter 3. "Root Causes" is that there are exactly four ultimate reasons for failure in software. One of them is lack of time.