Exercising my puny process muscle

Process sucks, but it's important

The Struggle

I don’t know when it happened, but I struggle with process. It always feels like it gets in the way of the actual work. Maybe it’s just me, but over the years since being out of the rigor of the school system, I’ve found myself being strongly adverse to meetings and the process that often comes with them. It is probably also related to spending the last 5 years at startups, but let’s come back to that.

In college, I learned about the Agile and Waterfall process methodologies. Like most people, I was given a disdain for Waterfall and was pushed towards Agile as the savior of process management and project delivery. Waterfall was always “too slow” and could cause you to end up painting yourself into a corner. Agile promised to be flexible and iterative. Since then, I’ve always been on the “we must iterate” train, but somewhere along the way, even Agile became too much. Maybe it was the weekly grooming, planning, and retro meetings that seemed to take an entire day, or maybe it was just being in Jira for too long. Something just makes me feel like “this should be simpler”. What I’m realizing is that it’s personal preference.

Process Is About The People

One of my fatal flaws (that I’m working through) is that if I think something is obvious or “just makes sense to me”, I think everyone understands it that way. It’s not necessarily an “I’m smarter than you” thing, it’s just that it makes sense in my head, so I think it must be simple to understand. This was often a problem when I was a kid and tried to help my fellow classmates with homework. If I already understood the problem, I’d say very unhelpful things like “it’s easy” or “you are making it too hard” or “just do this”. I’d never give them the proverbial fish, but the way I was trying to teach them how to solve the problem rarely seemed to help. It wasn’t until we went back and forth on it for awhile that I finally realized that something I just “understood” didn’t click for them. They were just thinking about it differently, so I couldn’t follow where the struggle was. I can get irrationally angry when I don’t understand the problem or the “why” behind something (again, something I’m working on), but couldn’t seem to get that is where they were at. They didn’t understand the problem or “why” something was done a certain way, and I could relate to that feeling. That’s when I was really able to be most helpful.

So that was a nice tangent, but how does this relate to process management? Well, it all comes back to understanding the problem. This mostly comes from experience, but I generally feel like I can gather what the problem to solve is from a brief conversation and then I’m just at a point of “okay great, I’ll just go figure out how to solve that”. That seems to work in small startups where you don’t need to organize groups of people to solve problems. But as your team size grows, that no longer works, but my brain still hasn’t caught up to that. I’m still thinking “I get what needs done, why do we need to be in this meeting for another 30 minutes?” or “We don’t need to write all of this down, I understand the problem and will come up with a solution”. But not everyone is on the same page or has the context I do in my head. That’s where things start to break down and you end up building the wrong thing, or one person needs to partially refactor their piece of the feature because there was an unstated/unknown misunderstanding. When organizing groups of people to do anything, clarity of direction is paramount. If everyone truly understands the problem, the vision or direction of where we are going, and how we generally plan to get there, everything else will just fall into place.

So how do you properly organize groups of people and ensure everyone is on the same page? You have a meeting of course! That’s how pretty much all of the project management processes accomplish anything, which makes sense. But how many meetings are too much? That’s always the tough balance. From previous posts, you know that I’ve become a fan of ShapeUp, the process that 37signals uses. It drives your process towards more focus time overall, and fewer meetings. They also write things down a lot more than most, so clarity is usually found in what is written down. I’m really not a fan of scheduled meetings. They get off track too easily and you often don’t accomplish what you set out to in the first place. One off meetings you need to have to get back on the same page or update everyone on some new information is enough for me. But if you don’t have something scheduled, sometimes people will never get updated. There is also something motivating about having a scheduled meeting on the calendar where there is an expectation to have something done. Like standup meetings or demo meetings. If you don’t have something to say or show, then people will sometimes wonder “did you do anything?”. It’s unfortunate, but part of a lot of work culture. Something about having a deadline pushes you to get things done (I know, I know. Parkinson’s Law).

Here’s where it gets weird. I’m an extrovert, well kind of. I don’t think of myself as one, but many people have told me I am one and were shocked I didn’t know (which was a good laugh). I always tested as an introvert on all of the personality tests as a kid, but that’s because I wanted to be around my group of friends who understood me (which was small because I grew up in a small town). But in that group, I’m the loudest. If we have a party, I’m probably going to talk to everyone there. At work parties, I often float around and am seen having a conversation with just about every group at some point. In public, that doesn’t necessarily pan out in the same way, because I feel misunderstood. Hence, I don’t feel like an extrovert. So with that being said, you’d think I’d like meetings more. And don’t get me wrong, I love to interact with people, but when it comes to spending time on process, I get bored. I want to be spending time on the work that matters, the fulfilling, deep work.

How I’m Improving

So how am I working on being part of the process rather than rebelling against it? Mostly, checking myself at the door and reminding myself that it is about getting us all on the same page. It allows me to get information out of my head and onto paper (well, virtual paper in Jira or whatever). I keep too much in my head, so I’m trying to plan out more in tickets and Notion documents (the tool of choice at my current job). It’s been tough, because I basically trained that out of my own productivity process for the sake of getting to the deep work. I used to plan out everything when I was younger, but I ditched all of that planning to “just get started”. That might work for me personally, but not when I’m a project lead trying to organize others to work alongside me. Ironically, that also doesn’t work for me. If I don’t write certain things down, I won’t remember them. My head can only maintain so much context. Mostly this is like appointments, family events, and other things that go on the calendar. If it isn’t on the calendar, it isn’t happening. So I’m trying to translate that into my daily work. If I don’t write it down, I can’t expect anyone else to remember it or do it.

Speaking of remembering to do something, let’s talk about maintenance tasks. They suck and are the epitome of rigorous process. What I really mean is that I’m bad with them. They frankly bore me both at work and personally. Cleaning, mowing, deleting old log files before they fill the storage, and you know, all the things you wish you could automate (yeah I know you can automate that last one). You set reminders on the calendar for when they need done or you schedule to always do it on Sunday morning. Then that day comes and it is literally the last thing you want to do. I just can’t do it, and I don’t really know why. I’ve strongly considered hiring services for all the house things I don’t want to do, but I still haven’t pulled the trigger. I know, first world privilege problems. But I’m working on it, mostly because I have a child now and need to ensure I’m building habits that will set a good example in the future. I’m trying to use it as an opportunity to clear my mind and take a breath. I still find the necessity of these tasks abhorrent, but I’m trying to find a small way to enjoy the process. All of this is also in service of being better with the process in software development. Even if I don’t want or need it, if it helps others be better engineers and coworkers, then I should find a way to make it work. Otherwise, what kind of teammate am I?