Done today
How to be effective
Hi all —
In the past few months I have gotten a lot of questions from my team about effectiveness, which basically come down to: “How is Rob able to get so much done?”
I ultimately came up with this: The most important things to me are time and doneness. My ethos can be summarized as follows:
Done is infinitely better than not done.
Today is immeasurably better than tomorrow.
So I prioritize getting the most important thing(s) done today.
This might seem trivial and obvious. Fortune cookie BS. The kind of thing you can agree with, then get back to doing work the way you were doing it before. Please resist the urge to do that, and explore this idea with me.
Done
How is done infinitely better than not done?
Let’s start with the obvious case: A feature that is done can be used by customers, where a feature that is not done cannot. Something that is not done has no value. Something that IS done can have value. Done vs. not done is dividing by zero: The difference in value is infinite.
“But what about getting something better done tomorrow?” Hold on this, we will explore it in the next section.
Things that are not done provide no value. Worse, they also have massive costs. Things that are not done occupy space in your brain until they’re done. They prevent you from focusing on getting other things done. And the costs of not done compound: Having many not done things is overwhelming and ultimately paralyzing.
Plus, things that are done have immeasurable benefits that compound in value over time. Something done can teach you new things - when we see a customer use a feature we’ve shipped, we learn new ways to add more value that we never would have predicted.
Done relieves stress, opens that space in your mind to tackle the next thing. Done helps you evolve into the next level version of yourself, and it moves the company forward. The next-level, focused version of you is worth infinitely more (to you, to me, and to the company) than the version stressed out, paralyzed, with a backlog of stuff mostly done.
This is why I get stressed out when I hear people say “almost done”, “mostly done”, or “my part is done”. Because all of these just mean not done, and the difference is infinite.
Today
How is today immeasurably better than tomorrow?
This is where I expect to encounter resistance. It usually comes in the form of the assumed trade-off between speed and quality. Or in the assumption that the “better” solution is the one that takes longer and has more moving pieces.
If you have these objections, there are two places where we likely disagree: (1) I place much higher cost on time, and (2) I don’t believe that time has anything to do with creating a “better” solution.
Time is expensive. Nonlinearly expensive. Something that gets done today costs my salary today. If I don’t get that thing done today, it costs my salary today and tomorrow. But it costs more than that: Add in the incalculable cost of what I missed out on learning today from “shipping” it tomorrow. And the opportunity cost of what I could have gotten done tomorrow if I’d gotten this thing done today. Add these costs up for each little thing I do, and you can see why I think time is really expensive. (Not to mention the fact that in a startup, we are always racing against the clock.)
Importantly, more time doesn’t guarantee a better solution. Imagine two versions of a feature: One that’s a 3-month version and one that’s a 1-day hack. How much of your personal wealth would you bet that the 3-month version will be better than the 1-day hack plus 2.9 months of tweaks based on observing what happens in practice?
Some things that I get done will end up being useless, while others will end up unlocking the next level of awesomeness for the company. We are generally incapable of predicting the future, and largely incapable of understanding the past. Things work or they don’t, and if we’re honest we can’t really explain why they do or don’t work. The probability of a 3-month solution being better than 3 months of 1-day iterations is near zero if we’re honest about what we do and can possibly know.
So when you multiply a high cost of time by a low probability of more time delivering a better outcome, the result is: today is immeasurably better than tomorrow.
Done Today - Implications for your work and life
Time is so valuable, we don’t have to pretend we know things, and we’ll learn and evolve from the practice of getting things done today. The mantra:
Done is infinitely better than not done.
Today is immeasurably better than tomorrow.
So I prioritize getting the most important thing(s) done today.
This mantra should change your attitude towards work. It’s not just about acting with urgency: You adjust your approach to the problems and opportunities you face. Here are some habits that I have found emerge from this mindset:
No multitasking, get one priority done at a time: Juggling lots of not done things is emotionally difficult, not to mention task-switching slows down any single thing getting done. Multi-tasking at a personal or team level kills morale, slows down the pace, and just makes work suck. Getting one thing DONE is exciting, and then you can move on with full force to the next thing. And it forces you to prioritize one thing at the expense of everything else, and not move on until that one thing is done, which is a good forcing function when you have a lot of important things to do. This is why having product teams that focus on one project per sprint is super powerful: We know that we’re going to get one really important thing done every 2 weeks, instead of a bunch of things “mostly done”.
Shaping simpler versions of projects: There are a thousand ways to solve any problem or capture any opportunity. “Shaping” is the process of getting from problem/opportunity to solution. When shaping, consider the cost of time and ask: What is the version of this that I can get done today? Important: Time spent shaping simpler versions is time well spent, because it prevents wasted time (and money) later. Plus, time shaping simpler versions tends to prevent organizational bloat: It doesn’t make sense to hire someone to “give them this big project” when you shape that big project into something simple that can be done today. In general, it forces you to keep teams small and hire less because the capability to ship things fast is what matters.
The inverse, impatience with long, complicated, ambiguous projects: I treat each additional person, moving part, or day you add to a project as if it increases the project’s cost by 10x. And the bigger the project, the higher the likelihood that it fails or worse - extends on indefinitely. At the same time bigger projects, because of the cost of time, have dramatically higher expected results - results which are rarely, if ever, achieved.
Time spent on open-ended, never-ending projects (e.g., “building the infrastructure for ___”) is the startup equivalent of invading Russia. People have a tendency to make projects bigger, longer, and more complicated than they need be, because nobody thinks about the cost of time and the value of done. They also include more people on projects than necessary, and inevitably when the long project drags on or fails, people tend to revise history to rewrite the project as a success and demand more resources. Such is the way of bureaucracies.
Showing my work: Time is so valuable, so I make sure that I pull in people who can tell me if I’m on the wrong track early. I try to ship a “good enough” version fast to see how people behave with it, to see if it really provides value. And I kill things that don’t have real demand as fast as I can without blaming myself for their failure, because the worst thing possible is wasting more time on something that’s not going to work.
Ownership of “done”: The evolution from “doing my part” to “owning this thing being in customers’ hands” is what matters. This is what’s often described as having ‘skin in the game’.
I hope this helps turn you into a craftsperson in a world of bureaucrats. This is a different frame of the world, one that is realistic about knowledge and the current state of everything but optimistic about what can be done when we value time more and what we think we know less.