There is a kind of stuck
that looks exactly like work.
The document grows.
The diagram gets another box.
The ticket is split into six tickets
that each need splitting.
Hours pass.
Nothing exists.
Planning is the most comfortable way
to avoid starting,
because it gives you
the feeling of progress
without the risk
of being wrong in public.
The tell is simple.
If you cannot say
what you will do
in the next twenty minutes,
you are not planning.
You are hiding.
A plan is not a sequence.
It is a direction
plus one action.
The direction can be vague.
The action cannot.
Improve the deploy process
is a direction.
Time the current deploy
and write down where it waits
is an action.
You can start the second one now,
badly,
and be further along
than an hour of thinking.
Twenty minutes is the size
that beats the resistance.
Small enough that starting
costs you nothing,
long enough that the work
starts talking back.
There is a reason for this
beyond discipline.
Step two is usually wrong.
You wrote it from the outside,
before you knew
what step one would teach you.
Half the time
step one deletes step two,
and you spent the morning
sequencing something
that no longer exists.
So take the step.
Then look again.
The plan updates itself
in contact with the work,
and it updates for free,
which is more than can be said
for the version
in the document.
This is not an argument
against thinking.
Big irreversible choices
deserve slow thought,
and they are far rarer
than we pretend.
Most of what fills a day
is reversible,
cheap,
and waiting on a decision
nobody needs to make perfectly.
So stop deciding the whole route.
Decide the next step.
Take it.
Look up.
The path shows itself
to people who are moving on it,
and to nobody else.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)