Making Progress

There are three elements I think are really important to making progress. They are focus, feedback, and clarity.

Focus is about having undistracted time dedicated to the thing. If I’m distracted, the work feels fast but moves slow. If I’m focused, I notice more details, discover important relationships more readily, and produce better results. Focus requires quiet. Focus is difficult because the world is noisy. My attention is in demand, and I have to protect it to get things done. That doesn’t mean I always isolate. Far from it. I often focus on other people so I can help them. The key is, no matter the work, to be present and mindful of the thing I’m doing, not all the other things I might do.

Feedback is about learning. Is what I did the right thing? What do I need to do better? What can I stop doing? These aren’t questions I can answer just by looking at the result. I need to read what other people have written about it. I need to test it. I need to reflect on it. I need to ask questions and listen to the answers. Feedback is difficult because asking good questions is hard, and listening well is even harder. Both take guts and strong, supportive relationships.

Clarity is about knowing what to do. Clarity comes from focused time and regular feedback. I need time to think deeply enough to understand the problem. I need feedback to learn enough to understand the problem. Understanding leads to options to try next. Trying the options requires focused time to carry out the experiment. Trying generates feedback. The side effects of this clarity cycle are getting real work done, learning more, and discovering the next right thing to do.

I often encounter difficult moments where I don’t know what to do next. This especially happens with ambiguous problems and new situations. These three things keep helping me. When I work this way, I feel an abundance of sanity. It gives me the oxygen I need get things right.

I also don’t take this cycle too seriously. Sometimes being distracted, ignorant, and mud-minded is a nice way to take a break from the world. Now where did I put the ice cream and my Netflix subscription?

Other thoughts:

• I really like Frozen and Frozen 2. Kristoff’s Lost in the Woods is a true masterpiece. Can you believe he doesn’t even get a song in the first movie? Anna’s The Next Right Thing is all about putting one foot in front of the other. Both movies are honestly great though. Elsa’s Let it Go is a timeless classic.

• One of my favorite books on focus is The One Thing by Gary Keller. I knew I needed to protect my time at work before reading it, but somehow that book was the trigger that got me to be be consistently intentional about how I spend my working hours.

• I also really like Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, which treats creating focused time as a management responsibility, instead of an individual one. It’s much easier to focus when leadership creates the space to do so.

• I think focus, feedback, and clarity dovetail nicely with Agile development, which values iterative work and regular, direct feedback.

February 5, 2022