Ship it Already!

Or are you wrestling with a chrome squirrel?

Are you comfortable with producing work that has no end? Are you comfortable not finishing a job and letting it continue until the end of time? You need to have a bias for action! You need to accept the work as it stands, stop fussing with that thing you are doing, realize that it is good enough to ship. 

Go! Ship it.

take my work — photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash
Constraints are our friends. Constraints help us find solutions when we were not looking. Forcing a time constraint, even if it is artificial, will urge us to produce work on time and allow us to deliver. 

What are you waiting for? Ship it already!

oooo, shiny…squirrel!
Too often we let things distract us from what is most important. A shiny squirrel sitting over in the corner begging for your attention, chittering away. Screeching for your attention. It has called you with that siren song…
I’m a problem
over here
you want to come to me
fix me instead.
Come to me, my Champion
come to me, my Warrior
come fix me
come solve my problem for me.

No. Stop! You need to have discipline. You need to finish the work that is in front of you and ship it! Quit screwing around, quit fussing about, quit picking at nits on the sweater and do the work that you need to do to complete the activity so you can move on to the next one! Ship it!

Discipline

The manufacturing world has a philosophy called one-piece flow. It is a lean manufacturing concept that allows and forces you to produce something and ship it. The discipline to complete one piece at a time. You may say, no, it is more efficient to work in batches. Yes and no. It depends on the item and the amount of work required, however, in the long run, one-piece flow kills batch processing. The concept behind it leads to shipping it. Create one thing, work that one thing, finish that one thing and ship it. Do it again. Wash, rinse and repeat.
which direction? photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash
Take the literal description of how this concept works, but the idea is to work through your actions, complete them, and deliver a finished product BEFORE you move on to the next thing. Do not try to multitask because multitasking is a fallacy. Make sure you do the hard work first and stop chasing after chrome squirrels. The most basic concept of this is that it is better to ship something, even if the quantity is not the same as requested, versus shipping nothing with a large amount of work in process, but nothing complete.

In order for you to deliver early and often is to recognize what level of quality as well as quantity before you are comfortable to ship. Please make the effort to not be perfect with your solution because perfect tends to be subjective, and may not add the value that you are expecting (imagining?) that comes with the shiny perfect solution you provide. You need to identify and understand what is good. What is acceptable? What is acceptable and can be shipped quickly? Depending on the type of product you are delivering, you may be able to ship a less-than-perfect solution to let it have a life. You may change someone’s life with an imperfect solution because you shipped it!

Use constraints to your advantage when it comes to shipping. Set those minimum constraints, those checkpoints that can help scope your working envelope and enable you to understand the value of what you are trying to ship. Is it the right number of words? Is it the right number of pieces? Is the paint dry? Is the date you selected realistic? Constraints that you apply will help with urgency. Force discipline. Use that motivation to initiate the proper amount of urgency and the right amount of attention in order for you to be successful. Ship it!

Go forth and be brilliant.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Snow and rain - not fun

Image
Endomondo Mountain biking Workout : "was out mountain biking 12.04 miles in 56m:01s using Endomondo." Okay, so this is one of those situations where bravado needs to take a back seat to the stupidity of riding offroad in the snow, rain, and sleet. Not only were my feet blocks of ice when I got done, my hands were almost non-functional, and silly me - I have to wash my bike after this exercise. Dumb. Don't get me wrong, I am glad I went out and did the ride, but I was not a happy boy. Riding as slow as I did due to the neat winds that swirl around here didn't help.  Here is a picture of the dirty bike after riding. So averaging just under 13 mph with a 37°F day made it about 29°F with wind chill . Chart can be found at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/windchill/index.shtml and there is a nice little calculator on the page listed so you can determine the actual chill factor when you ride in fabulous weather such as this. I should have borrowed a co-worker'
Read more

Simple Is Often Better

Image
Maybe we should even restate it by saying that simple is always better. “eyeglasses with black frames” by Jess Watters on  Unsplash Simple. The word itself is simple. The opposite of complex, the opposite of making it so confusing that it requires three people to work on it. It is as simple as one element, one piece. Simple is elegant in its scarcity. When you say “ wow, that was simple, ” you say it with a smile. When you say “ wow, that was complex ” it is usually prefaced or closed with expletives. Now, this is not a treatise against technology, even though technology is taking over. It is adding more complexity to our cars (e.g. self-driving vehicles) or that our appliances are now connected to the web and have browsers and screens built into them, enabled to determine where you are short on foodstuffs. There are (lots of) times when you want simple. It is recognized that self-driving vehicles are required to be complex because of the daunting task for enginee
Read more

Humans are Messy

Image
“painting of man” by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on  Unsplash Face it, we humans are a messy lot. We are a train wreck of sound and fury. Yet we are innately capable of amazing things — and we have opposable thumbs. Because humans are messy, we need to learn to be effective, especially when we need to accomplish tasks. We need to consider and take the effort to walk around in the shoes of others — to be inside of their skin and take on their worldview . Having an empathetic perspective helps us grow and connect. Leaders and managers need to understand the delicate balances of how their direct reports react to information, whilst also understanding the nuances of diplomacy and political marshes surrounding them created by their own peers and superiors. In order to succeed, we need to listen and pay attention . Why? Filters and biases warp our worlds. “person lying down on white surface” by mwangi gatheca on  Unsplash We all have emotions. We also have filters and biases.
Read more