I know that common practice is to finish a story and have it critiqued by fellow writers right away, but it seems a waste to me to get people's feedback on a first draft.
I firmly believe that all writers will be able to see where they can improve their work if they shove it in a drawer and forget about it for a few months. (Well, for the first couple of weeks at least, we'll be obsessing about it. But then the next shiny idea should hit us like a cartoon safe from the sky, and we really should get distracted by other things. Possibly the life we neglected during the rush of writing the first draft.) There's no way to look objectively at something you've just crafted; when you have the full force of the process in your short-term memory and each word is weighed on the merit of the blood/sweat/tears sacrifice instead of its value as part of an entire story.
I'm actually not convinced about the usefulness of writing workshops or critique groups, but that's to talk about another day.