Don't Sweat the Petty Things.
Overall,
you're interested in saving time across the whole of your application,
so if you've got a data step that is only ever going to process a few
observations, don't spend a huge amount of time in refining it.
Saying that, it's good
practice to get into the habit of using some of the techniques
illustrated across these pages so that they become natural for you when
coding up programs.
Overall : Be diligent.
Sometimes when you've already spent a long time getting the program
working, and created a masterpiece of processing, dotting the i's and
crossing the t's may seem like a lot of effort, but in the end it's
what often makes the difference between the best programs.