Conversation

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2. Fun This is serious. If the project is actually well-conceived, and you chose it yourself, the details are so much fun, stepping back to do even bits of PM that you can rationally see will lead to grief if neglected feel like torture. Pure PMs don’t have that temptation.
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3. The territory, unlike the map, is a “live” surface. It generates data whether or not you want it to. Builds break. The 3D printer sticks. You ordered the wrong part. You can’t crimp as well as you hoped and need more practice.
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By contrast PM artifacts don’t change unless you make an effort to change them. They just become wronger and more useless over time if you don’t. By contrast, work territories don’t get wrong or useless. They become confused, disorganized, and messy.
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Now, just as in pure PM, certain artifacts emerge naturally (spreadsheets, timeline charts, lists of things), in “work” certain artifacts emerge naturally: inventories, clutter, boxes, digital files. But unlike the PM artifacts, they are “alive” and change on their own.
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This means, to the extent you avoid fighting what work artifacts want to “do” naturally, things go more smoothly. This led me to an insight which is likely “Doh, that’s obvious” to more hands-on types: You don’t manage yourself and the work, the work manages itself and you.
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Take a cluttered workbench. You literally can’t work while it’s cluttered. So cleanup is forced by the bench itself. Same with safety. You need at most 1 lesson in things like “soldering irons burn, cutting tools generate shrapnel before becoming wonderfully conscientious.
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Digital artifacts are less self-enforcing. Even backups are less of a self-disciplining thing as more of us work off cloud drives and auto-saving apps with infinite storage. But even there, you get *some* live and unstable/consequential behavior.
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I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I’m sort of slowly training my instincts to just go with the 3 key features instead of fighting them, and allow the work to manage itself and me. Not quite mind like water. Maybe mind like workshop.
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All I know is, my sabbatical trying to do maker-type stuff is making me question everything I thought I knew about project management, from GTD to scrum to grant charts.
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That stuff is not wrong as such, but much more strongly restricted to hierarchical contexts where PM can be artificially abstracted out as an exclusive org role. For self-managed contexts, it is not even wrong.
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I think I avoided learning this because in my time as an individual contributor I always figured out how to take on projects that required absolutely minimal self-management and had very high natural “flow” (math theory and simulation back when I was in research, writing later).
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My current approach is a sort of “pave the workpaths” (as in pave the cowpaths”). Get attuned to how the work and tools naturally move, add minimum scaffolding for safety, and highly situated artifacts to augment. The holy grail is: a workspace so intuitive it needs no text.
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That’s a True North rather than an actual aspiration. Example: poorly designed containers/drawers force you to manage inventory on a spreadsheet. Well-designed ones just trigger a “buy more soon” event in your awareness when necessary. You just manage exceptions, not states.
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Like those tissue boxes where last few are differently colored. Instead of constantly updating an inventory spreadsheet, you update a shopping list when needed.
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Sufficiently advanced project management is indistinguishable from doing the dishes Sufficiently advanced project management is indistinguishable from cleaning up after yourself Sufficiently advanced project management is indistinguishable from putting away your toys
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The kitchen is a place where these ideas are latent, and I used cooking as my core example in my book Tempo. But somehow, they’re so intuitive there, they don’t generalize easily. So even though I cook a lot, I didn’t truly grok any of this in the kitchen context.
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