I'm not the first to write about this, but I was out picking blackberries today and wanted to chime in on an oft-used phrase: "low-hanging fruit" I've often heard it used as a way to describe something easy to accomplish, perhaps meaning that if all things are equal you should choose to do the thing that's easiest.
While picking berries, however, I noticed that the berries that were higher up were riper. This means a lot of things, most of them good. They were sweeter and juicier which means they were the better fruit. They were also, counter-intuitively, easier to pick: the less ripe berries at eye-level were more firmly attached to their stems and took more force to pull them off. Because they were higher up, I did have to stretch to my limit. I also got pricked by some thorns and bled a little. Still, it meant I was able to fill my bucket and get some really tasty fruit for dinner.
Sometimes the "easy" thing to do won't get you closer to your real goal. At work, we've identified an area that could use a half-dozen minor fixes, but all acknowledge the real solution is to rewrite the section and be done with the patches. All things being equal, you should pick the thing you don't have to stand on your tip-toes to do... but if things aren't equal, you should just pick the right thing.
