My excuses for not joining the Cult of Done (yet)

I read The Cult of Done Manifesto a few days ago and it resonated so much with me.

 1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

Like any brilliant piece of writing, it caused me to reflect a lot and now I'm writing down those reflections.

I'm the kind of person who always has multiple projects in flight. Unfortunately many of them never end and never see the light of day. After reading the manifesto, I've decided to change my ways, but first, we must confront the reasons why my projects don't get done and dismantle them.

1. "There's no such thing as done"

I mostly work on software projects and one of the problems with such an intangible domain is that things can always be added on. Scope can be expanded. There's no such thing as done.

This is a lie. Or at least untrue enough that it should be disregarded for forming a worldview. While software projects are often endlessly extensible, there exists (to the delight of kanban ticket writers everywhere) a definition of done. It's important to be able to identify and agree on this with stakeholders rather than adopt a you'll know it when you see it approach. I'm often fast and loose with requirements (to the despair of product managers everywhere) but the truth is even I have end states in mind for the projects I start. The true problem is that I'm getting *distracted *and not keeping up the momentum or traction needed to finish what I've started.

In my role as a Growth Engineer at RelianceHMO, one of the ceremonies we had was a standup where a different member of the team each week had to share a piece of wisdom that they had encountered. One day someone shared that they had seen that the opposite of distraction was not focus. It was traction. I was intrigued by the idea. I still need to read Nir Eyal's book on the subject, but its a paradigm I try to look at things through. Rather than treat focus state as some holy grail to aspire to, I need to find and sustain traction towards my goals.

One way of being indistractable is to ruthlessly prioritise. I enjoy a good flight of fancy and getting nerd sniped, for example trying to write a querybuilder as part of building my blog (it was riddled with bugs of course), but I think its important to channel those in service of the goal ie traction or park them for later ie avoiding distraction.

It's interesting because I don't think I'll ever be rid of my side quest mania, so the challenge is making sure they lather up into progress toward my goals. I think I did that quite well with the query builder project where I made sure that everything I did on this side quest within a side quest helped make progress on the main quest.

2. "I don't know what I'm doing"

The Dunning-Kruger effect captures, among other things, a phenomenon known as the valley of despair. It's where you know enough to know that you don't know enough. In my experience, it can be a terrible place to be and needs to be deliberately pushed past. In relation to getting things done, here's a fun anecdote; It's very often that I start a project with the naive optimism that this will be accomplished very quickly, perhaps even initially making lots of progress before realising that its harder than it looks and then falling into despair that I won't be able to accomplish it, or at least accomplish it to the same degree that a hypothetically more qualified person might.

A good anecdote for this is an interview I had near the start of my career. I had an interview for an internship at Konga.com. The first round was a hackathon style session with teams formed with other candidates to build a prototype ecommerce application and then an oral interview afterwards. Despite my team not managing to ship anything in about an afternoon of work, I must have done enough to earn a follow up interview. The follow up was an in person coding exercise in JavaScript + interview. After answering the initial questions, if memory serves, I was asked to write a program to convert a string representing time in a digital clock format, to some other format. Unfortunately, at the time I knew very little JavaScript (which is ironic now because I’ve been writing primarily TypeScript at work for the last 6 years and have written barely any PHP in almost 10) so I wasn’t sure what the syntax to split the string would be. I immediately told the interviewer I could do it and began apologising for wasting their time. Thankfully, to quote Ted Lasso, the interviewer was curious rather than judgemental and after some probing realised PHP was my primary language and I knew how to implement a solution in that. I did well enough to get an offer to join the Kadet program, but turned it down to work at Amore Nigeria instead. I’ve since developed more resilience than disqualifying myself at the first hurdle.

Done is done, even if its not perfect or to the standard you might have liked in an ideal world. The manifesto has three points I really like in regards to this:

2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

Everything as a draft removes the pressure of getting it right before getting it done.

4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

Honestly, ability is overrated. Especially because it often grows by doing. So not having it isn't really a good excuse for not doing.

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

No notes. Perfectly phrased.

3. "I will get to it eventually"

Sometimes I find myself holding on to the ghosts of the idea that could have been. I try to convince myself that I'll get around to doing it or starting or working on it, but every time there's an opportunity to do it, I find a way to distract myself.

5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, its execution that really counts. If you can't or won't do it, make space in your mind for other things.

11. Destruction is a variant of done.

Destroying the idea you're not making or the half finished thing you'll never complete counts as done as well.

4. "Dopamine from talking about it"

Having said that one should get rid of ideas they won’t do, I do think there’s good that comes out of sharing ideas. You never know what or who your shared idea will inspire and so it’s worth putting it out into the world.

As the manifesto says:

 12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

I’ve read common wisdom that asserts that you shouldn’t talk about your goals because telling people about them releases dopamine in the same way that accomplishing them would, thus ruining your reward function.

Intriguingly enough, I think I get the same think from daydreaming about my goals too much. So my stack rank for actions-that-don’t-quite-count-as-done is:

Writing & sharing > Writing > Talking > Thinking

5 "Loop"

The human condition is a loop. History repeats itself (or at least rhymes). The more things change, the more they stay the same. Inertia.

This is true, but we have agency to live out each loop, each iteration of our wonderful lives a little differently from the last. If we were not disciples of done in the last loop, there’s nothing stopping us from being that in this one.

13. Done is the engine of more.

Having started by debunking “there’s no such thing as done” I will come back to say only kinda. Getting things done is really in service of getting the next thing done. Of course, the “next thing” can be taking a break or resting or whatever, but it’s worth not sleepwalking into that next thing.

6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

And now, this article is done.