In Crazy Charlie’s Window Michael Lopp says something that has stuck with me for a couple of weeks now (emphasis mine):

The reason, decades later, I frequently think of this unpaid weekend adventure sifting through a year of garbage, hardware, and knick-knacks is because it is when I discovered the compounding non-obvious value from doing exceptional work.

It’s a great story, well worth reading. Matthew Ström makes this point in a slightly different way in The polish paradox (again, emphasis mine):

The polish paradox is that the highest degrees of craft and quality are in the spaces we can’t see, the places we don’t necessarily look. Polish can’t be an afterthought. It must an integral part of the process, a commitment to excellence from the beginning. The unseen effort to perfect every hidden aspect elevates products from good to great.

Doing good work and getting the details right result in better outcomes, yes. But it’s about more than that. It’s not just about the job, it’s about us. The sense of accomplishment and purpose that comes from doing great work is an intrinsic reward that is life-giving far beyond the confines of our immediate job duties.

I recently mentioned how I like to draw it until it works when I’m ramping up on a new system. Clint Byrum says it so much better in his post System Diagrams are Performance Caches for Cognitive Load. First, this bit resonated with me because it’s exactly the situation I currently find myself in:

Having joined just a few months ago, I was overwhelmed about 5 minutes into the meeting. The individual words and concepts all made sense. JSON parsing slow. Network transit treacherous. Changing things at the source hard. I got all of those components of the discussion, but through the whole thing I was just barely able to follow the overall system conversation and ask very basic questions to understand what was going on. I came away with a bunch of exploratory personal action items, and a very clear hole in my mental model of the system that needs to be filled.

Clint goes on to use a systems analogy for the individual people that make up a team—people and knowledge as components of caching, computation, and storage. This leads to a perfect explanation for why system diagrams are so important:

A single system diagram is where those primed nodes can push the most relevant bits of their information out of their local brain-caches, and into a high-performance distributed cache from which everyone can read. This will preserve precious cognitive load for those critical low-latency tasks. Of course, all of these caches may be stale. The local in-memory ones are particularly hard to test, but at least the system diagram is observable. Everyone can look at it, and if there are nodes with updates, they can update the cache.

So, prime those caches. Draw it until it works!

I don’t agree with everything on this list of how to send progress updates, but these two points are especially important and worth remembering:

Acknowledge changes explicitly. If you said a the last time and b this time, and b conflicts with a, you need to explain the inconsistency. People perceive acknowledged inconsistencies as cost of doing business, but unacknowledged inconsistencies as broken promises.

I name this section “challenges and requests” in my updates, but the underlying principle is the same:

Add a dedicated section for worries and failures. Be honest, have good plans, and don’t panic. People are drawn to conscientiousness and vulnerability but repelled from haplessness and histrionics.

This has been shared around quite a bit over the past couple of weeks, but Anil Dash has written another[1] modern classic in Make better documents. Excellent advice all around, including:

Similar to the importance of sequencing and order, you almost always want to start by clearly and simply stating your conclusion, or declaring your request or question. Very often, people feel a lot of anxiety about the need to preface their big dramatic point with lots of build-up. But you almost never want to be building dramatic tension in a professional context; this isn’t a thriller where you’re trying to surprise them with twists and turns.

And:

Similarly, you’ll want to constrain your requests to your audience to be something they can react to constructively. “Do we want to invest at the higher cost of Option A to move faster, or go with the lower cost of Option B to be more cautious?” That’s an answerable question! And it’s perfectly fine if it leads to a conversation where a third option is explored — but you never would have gotten there with a prompt that says, “What do we want to do next?”

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1. Never forget: If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault  ↩

I found this essay on why we do things that are bad for us really interesting. First, I learned the word “akrasia”, which means “the state of mind in which someone acts against their better judgment through weakness of will.” Second, this is not exactly a new thing. From Romans 7:18–19:

For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

Anyway, I thought this was helpful advice:

To achieve your goals, it can be more effective to put into place a defined plan that doesn’t let you reconsider. The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer called this an implementation intention: come up with a specific if/then statement that helps you achieve your goal. If it’s Tuesday, then I will go to yoga class; if I buy spinach, then I will make this smoothie for breakfast the next morning.

The importance of async work and cutting down on meetings to allow for more Deep Work time won’t be new to regular readers of the blog. And yet I can’t resist sharing another article about it… How Asana and Slack’s meeting purges have paid off has the usual methods and recommendations in it (although “Meeting Rest” is a new one to me—read the article for details).

Instead what I want to focus on here is a few pull quotes about the results companies report once they were able to successful reduce their meetings. Here’s Asana:

A few months later meeting lengths had shrunk. Most 30-minute meetings were converted to 15 minutes, some weekly meetings were moved to every other week or month, and others were deleted entirely. That meant each person was saving an average of 11 hours per month, totaling about 3.5 workweeks per year.

And:

The 60 participants saved 265 hours per month in total when reducing unproductive recurring meetings. In the aftermath of our meeting reset, employees are much more strategic and thoughtful about removing items from meeting agendas that can be effectively handled asynchronously.

From Remote:

By cutting down on meetings, we’re not just saving time. We’re also empowering our teams to work on their own schedules. This gives our employees a sense of autonomy and keeps them motivated, fostering a culture of productivity and efficiency.

And finally, Typeform:

We sent another engagement form to the team to see how they were feeling after we made these changes. The ‘ways of working’ score went up more than 10 points. Trimming our meeting time has helped our employees and our customers, which is really satisfying.

It’s worth the effort, friends. Re-evaluate the need for all those meetings. Embrace async. It leads to happier employees and more effective communication in permanent places that can be referenced in the future. And, importantly, it leads to higher quality products because no one has to rush through “actual work” after all their meetings are finally done for the day.