Starting Backwards

Why can’t you just do it?

Why not just do the task that you need to do? Why use lists, task management, work orders, contracts, meetings? Why use paperwork and bureaucracy? Don’t they just slow you down? Let’s make a model:

All models are wrong; some are useful. How useful is this model useful? It’s probably useful for tying shoelaces; it’s probably not useful for planning a surgery. But how complicated does something have to be before the cost of additional process pays for itself? Sadly, the ‘shoelaces…surgery’ model is useless in answering the question, what is the limit of the ‘just do it’ model? Let’s look for some better boundaries.

If you don’t know what you want or need to do, then the model isn’t helpful at all. Example: if you don’t know whether you want to wear shoes or not, then ‘just do it’ doesn’t help. Or if you don’t know that you need to do something: if you don’t know your shoelaces came untied, then ‘just do it’ won’t help you figure out that you need to tie them right now.

[ ] work it out

• have what you want? do something. flowchart.

• glossary/canon pages ** work breakdown breakdown **** non-overlapping domains ***** handling overlap (write book vs make money) **** input-output-outcome loop

• don’t know what to do

  • don’t know what I want
    • vision/mission/strategy
    • work backward from values?
    • input/output/outcome
  • don’t know how to get it
    • don’t know what the work is
    • don’t know how to do the work
    • don’t know if the thing I think I did caused the result I think I observed
  • don’t know if I have it (“Epistomelogical barriers to project evaluation”)
    • definition of success?
    • don’t even know for sure what result I observed
      • what is truth?
        • gold standard: double-blind randomized experiments
          • often useless
            • don’t have extra multiverses to use
            • ‘things we could know if we had a finite but impractical number of magic observers’
            • ‘knowledge that can’t exist’, (¿inverse of knowledge that doesn’t matter—teapot thought experiment ?)
        • truth = metrics?
          • compstat effect
          • “can’t measure, can’t manage” → ‘can’t measure, don’t manage even if you should’
        • people factors
          • thermocline of truth
          • credit & responsibility & accountability
          • Emperor’s New Clothes examples like WeWork and Uber
            • some are emperor’s new clothes
            • others are hidden goals—e.g., vampire capitalists & other embezzlers
        • recursive problem of how sure you need to be about how sure you need to be about …

• Too much

  • too much to remember
  • competing priorities
    • Technique: Splitting things up into domains
      • how/why? Mutually exclusive categories (doing X has no impact on whether or not Y happens, other than my time); limiting context (things I can do in the car; things I can only do at home)

• >1 brain involved

  • brains lost to friction
  • conflict
  • your future brain counts as another brain

• don’t know how to do it

  • work breakdown is hard
  • dependencies
  • unpredictability
  • paradox of inconsistency consistency
    • so many exceptions, so the basic process isn’t enough
      • different kinds of work to track
        • project
        • process
        • recurring input, output, or outcome (did you jog today? what was your time today?)
      • scope creep
        • good kinds and bad kinds
          • premise of Agile vs waterfall. In waterfall, you are sure you know what needs to be done, and scope creep is mostly to be avoided. In Agile, you are sure you don’t know, and scope creep reflects mostly the customer figuring out what they need, so use a process where scope creep is cheap and encouraged, and obsolete plans are deprecated.
      • followup
        • reminders & contingent reminders
    • once we’ve accommodated all of the limits of our tools and worked out how to do stuff anyway, then we are stuck in that consistency/inconsistency
  • stuck in a rut consistency
  • messy process inconsistency
  • forgetting the basics inconsistency