Sometimes not doing the ‘thing’ (in the sense of not jumping into a goal or project) is actually a deliberate, healthy choice — resting, recharging, being in a better mental/physical state. That’s not laziness or procrastination; it’s recovery or self-care.
Things that aren't doing the thing
181–190 of 220 posts
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#182> Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing. For some types of work, the work we call prep work is 90% of the work and most of what determines how well the finished product turns out. Painting is a good example. You can grab a bucket of paint and paint brush and start “doing the thing” by slapping paint on the surface. Your paint job is going to be very poor and fail early relative to a professional who properl…
Painting is such a good example, and is one of the closest analogies to programming. You can do it fast and it’ll be done but you probably won’t like it. Or you can prep for it and it’ll take 10x longer, you won’t see anything for 90% of the time and it’ll be done in the blink of an eye.
At work I got asked for a feature a while back. We tee shirt size estimates and I said it was an XL. I came back a week later at our next planning sync and said I was going to work on it that day and we’d have it tomorrow. PM was very confused and worried about committing to an XL task in 24 hours - but I’d spent probably 3 days of the last week planning, doing requirements, writing up a spec sheet, weighing up against alternatives etc, and came up with the “simple solution” that we could smash out in a few hours. All of that time was “doing the thing”.
(Well, most of it. Some of it was just naval gazing and wondering if it really could be that simple…)
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly, but don't get confused: You are not doing the thing, until you do the thing. There are many ways to do the thing. There are many more ways to not do the thing.
Oh you are absolutely doing the thing in this situation, as in you're in the process of doing it, somewhere between 1% and 99% of the way there depending on the context. You haven't done the thing until you actually fully do the thing, it is true. But most of the work could be in this preparatory meta work, and of course it means nothing without the final all important step of doing the thing, but there you have it,…
How far along are you on the action item?
The item is all done. I'm waiting for the action.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#184Problem with this approach is someone who follows it will find themselves doing something totally useless almost all of the time. "Just doing the thing" means that usually you are merely doing a hobby - most of the time, being unaware of that, believing you were building a business.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#185I was just reading about Ron Jeffries' disastrous attempts to write a Sudoku program because he dogmatically refused to do any preparatory work--including spending any time at all thinking about the nature of the problem and what sorts of data structures would be suitable for solving it.
As I see it he was doing exactly the opposite: prep work in terms of doing the tests.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#186This hits hard, not in my programming work which it also hits but there at least I am sharpening my toolset by reading books, and learning things. This hits the hardest for me training Jiu Jitsu, where I do love the sport but I feel it's so hard to come back to training when I am in such a bad shape. So I say to people that I do Jiu Jitsu, I watch videos, I follow some competitions. Heck I even go with my kids to THEIR training but I only train myself once a month maybe at this rate.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#187There is an extreme where you procrastinate on the real work, yes. But half the things on the list are not procrastination, but preparation. If you skip those you hit the other extreme where you are so focused on doing the thing, you waste your time because you don't know the background or context.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#188Ironically, sometimes the only thing that will get you doing the thing is explicitly not doing the thing (but also no other thing either), until there's nothing to do but the thing.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's right, you're not producing paperclips unless one minute you have metal wire and the next minute you have a paperclip.
The ways in which you can do things around, but never actually producing a single paperclip are infinite.
That's true, but the number of paperclips you'll produce if you only devote effort to things that directly produce paperclips is also very low.
It can be really difficult to strike that productive balance.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#190Wow this article is an amazing rorschach test!
Each defensive comment here is a person defending what he thinks this article is personally attacking him on!