Doing the thing without preparing to do the thing is, depending on your exact definitions, either unwise or impossible.
Things that aren't doing the thing
51–60 of 220 posts
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#52I wonder what thing the author was avoiding when they published this thing ;)
IIRC, the author said somewhere that this essay was effectively a “note to self”.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#53Right but I see this taken too far. Getting side eyed for creating a Jira ticket not doing it now. Dude, I am creating a Jira ticket because I have 100 things to do and need to actual priorise this! If I do stuff in the order of serendipity I will definitely be inefficient.
If you don't create the ticket, it may never get done, too! That not doing the thing might lead to convincing others the thing needs to be done which directly leads to doing the thing.
It may not be doing the thing, but it enabled the thing to be able to be done at all. Cheers to the precursors, the planners and the annotators. Through you, more things are done.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#54I see lots of comments focusing on cases where there is necessary research still to do.
Which I think misses the point - which is there are times when you’ve already done enough research, but you’re afraid to act so you procrastinate. i.e. not doing the thing.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#55All true, but worth noting that sometimes making that to-do list is the first step to doing the thing because picking the first item off the list and taking 10 minutes to do it is doing the thing. If you aren't doing the thing because it's a monolith in your brain that is going to consume the next 6 months of your life and you're paralyzed by its enormity, salami slicing 10 minute chunks off the front of it can be a good way to get started.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#56Right but I see this taken too far. Getting side eyed for creating a Jira ticket not doing it now. Dude, I am creating a Jira ticket because I have 100 things to do and need to actual priorise this! If I do stuff in the order of serendipity I will definitely be inefficient.
I am creating a jira ticket because I will forget I have done the thing.
I am also creating a jira ticket because 11 months later when another engineer is trying to figure out if the code they're staring at is still actually valuable or if they can rip it out safely, they are going to use git blame to find the pull request where the thing was done, that pull request is going to mention the jira ticket, and the jira ticket is going to reference the design document that justified why we did the thing. If we don't do those things, that engineer is going to yank that functionality out and something way over there is going to break without anybody realizing it broke.
Your mileage may vary. Some teams make the PRs detailed enough that they don't have to fall back on jira. Other teams try to encode this information into unit tests (that helps but it's circular reasoning; the unit test will tell you that somebody at one point thought that this was important enough to verify that it keeps doing the thing; they won't tell you why the thing matters or what customer wanted the thing or whether the thing was the thing we did before we pivoted to doing the new thing cuz the old thing didn't make money).
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#57In the Viable System Model[0], "doing the thing" is System 1. Yes of course you need System 1 or the thing won't get done. But in any viable system, you also have the "meta-systems", Systems 2-5: - System 2: coordination between multiple Systems 1 (which includes prioritization, communication, and exceptional conditions) - System 3: resource allocation and process development - System 4: strategy and risk management…
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.
That's right, you're not producing paperclips unless one minute you have metal wire and the next minute you have a paperclip.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#58I had this Ah-Ha moment a while back when I was presenting on how to shorten cloud outage times, by aggregating impact into a list of details, and hustling around to make connections to support engineers and their customers and the poor backend engineers running around trying to make sense of it all. Putting a little bit of structure to it, so other people can realize they can make a difference in a large organization.
I had a colleague make a passive aggressive comment about it being really cool how I put together "obvious" stuff. Well, it is obvious. At the same time, I have never seen him do this "obvious thing".
Doing the thing is being a performer. Making the thing happen somehow is called leadership. It's all about doing the thing, and not just seeing and understanding the thing - that's the easy part.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#59> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
Don’t agree. Planning steps is part of doing the thing.
Re: Things that aren't doing the thing
#60I'm trying to do the thing, but the thing is horribly documented and doesn't work. And nobody seems to know why. So am I still doing the thing if the thing isn't doing its thing?