07.
The Daily Bookend

Daily Rhythm That Operationalizes Commitment and Boundaries

It's hard to lose when projects finish on time. It's not clients that cause delays in the average project, it's technical debt. Plainly, that means we could have had a conversation earlier to iron out the creases we're now seeing, but we didn't want to. When projects take longer than they should it's because innumerable small assumptions, unasked questions, and exclusions in communication were all tolerated. If we want to avoid big delays we need to avoid the small ones, or at least manage them.

"Delays in feedback loops can mask important, often critical, system information and system dynamics. Management must be aware of the delays."

— Simple_Complexity by William Donaldson

This is why we use the smallest reasonable unit of measurement — a day — to measure progress against our plans for projects:

1. We review today's commitments across all active projects each morning
2. We end each day by reviewing the delivery of each commitment for that day, to ourselves, our teammates, and our clients

What this accomplishes:

• We replace surveillance with trust. By confirming what we can expect today, then measuring the result against the expectation, we create a simple repeating cadence that signals to your team what the standard is. You trust them to get their work done without micromanagement
• We create professional excellence during work hours. When you're at work we expect 100% and less than that is below our standard
• We separate work from life. When we say go home and enjoy yourself, we mean it. Outside of emergencies, no one will contact you about work out of hours
• We make scaling possible. The approach provides clarity, whether we have one or 20 projects. And if things are hectic with 6 people delivering 12 projects, imagine the stress of doubling both those numbers

A Waste of Time

"Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating"

— John Cleese

A popular concern of talking about efficiency (and how to improve it) is an automatic rejection of the concept. People assume that the expectation is to remove all play and humor in order to cram more seriousness and "productivity" into your day. It's unsurprising given how "productivity" and "efficiency" are one and the same to many.

Being productive can (should) include play. And waste. And any activity that provides the conditions for success; it's part of the reason why clients ask for your help. Call it brainstorming, spitballing, ideation, or shower thoughts, I don't care — you need to respect people's need for what happens before decisions get made. The quality of your decisions rely on the quality of your choices, which are afforded by spending time "unproductively." How do you record that time? As an important part of the project itself.

Where does play end? One a decision has been made. That's the moment the conversation turns toward efficiency, where we commit to a course of action, turning away from possibilities and drawing a straight line towards the commitment. There is always a better idea or a better design, but there's finite time to accomplish a design. There is no perfect amount of time for a given job — you can make a nice omelette in ten seconds. We need enough time (hours) spread over time (days) to allow ourselves room enough to provide good ideas and bad. Play has to end at some point and it ends with a decision.

Play is about probabilism — anything could happen here; commitment is about determinism — we've decided where we're going, get in. Small firms tend to never identify that there are two modes, nor recognize which one they are in. Work mixes and meanders, wavering aimlessly, usually led by the whims of the client ('one last change!'). This explains why many talented firms position themselves as 'inclusive' of the client, 'making them the champion,' missing the point of the relationship entirely. If we want efficiency we need to plan for "waste."

All successful projects happen on time (and budget) because a team commits to the decision of what is (and is not) included. That's efficiency. The odds are stacked against you if you do not allow for play. that's productivity. Knowing whether commitments are being made and delivered is extremely difficult when meetings are weekly, even several times weekly. The Bookend is the radar for observing status — very short, very specific, very honest pings at the beginning and end of each day — in order to track more accurately the expectations of efficiency against the agreed upon plan. These meetings end up being rituals that make transparent the needs of each measurable unit of our careers: days.