The Task You Should Still Do Yourself

Two reasons a task is slow

Some work takes a long time because the output is laborious to produce.

Other work takes a long time because you are deciding something while you do it, and the doing is how the deciding happens.

The first kind can be handed to anybody or anything capable of producing it.

The second cannot, and handing it over produces the output without the decision, which is the failure worth understanding.

Where the process is the product

• Quoting an unfamiliar job.
• Deciding what to charge.
• Working out whether to take work on.
• Planning the year.
• Writing the difficult email.
• Reviewing what went wrong.

The first is the clearest. Working through a quote is how you notice the access problem, the extra day, and the thing the customer has not mentioned. A quote produced instantly is a number without any of that noticing in it.

Writing is thinking, sometimes

Which is the case people most often get wrong.

Some writing is transcription: you know what to say and the task is putting it into sentences.

Other writing is where you find out what you think, and the third paragraph changes the first because writing it revealed something.

Handing over the second kind produces something coherent that contains none of the discovery.

You can tell which you have by whether you know the conclusion before starting.

Where you do not, write it yourself, and where you do, the tool is transcribing rather than thinking.

A worked example

A business used a tool to produce a response to a customer complaint, supplying the situation and getting back a measured, reasonable reply.

They sent it, and it committed them to a remedy the owner would not have offered had he worked through it.

Writing the reply himself would have taken twenty minutes and included the moment where he decided what he was actually prepared to do.

The tool had produced the reasonable-sounding answer, which is not the same as his answer.

He now decides the remedy first, on paper, and only then uses anything to phrase it.

Which is the correct order and takes almost the same total time.

The test before handing something over

One question, asked before starting.

Do I already know what the answer is.

If yes, the work is production and can be assisted, accelerated, or delegated.

If no, the work is deciding, and the thinking has to happen before anything else does.

That question takes five seconds and prevents most of this.

It also applies to delegating to people, which is where most of us learned the lesson already and forget to transfer it.

Speed can hide a bad decision

The reason this matters more than it appears.

A slow process gives you time to notice discomfort: the job you do not really want, the price that is too low, the customer who is going to be difficult.

That discomfort arrives during the work and has nowhere to arrive if the work takes four seconds.

So the friction is doing something, and removing all of it removes the signal along with the effort.

Which is not an argument for slowness generally, and is an argument for keeping it where judgement is what you are selling.

What judgement actually looks like

Worth naming, since it is easy to be vague about.

Knowing which of two acceptable answers fits this particular customer.

Knowing when the stated problem is not the real one.

Knowing what you are prepared to do and what you are not.

And knowing when something is worth raising even though nobody asked.

None of those is retrievable from anything, because none of them is written down anywhere, including by you.

They are also the part of your work customers are actually paying for, which is the argument for protecting the tasks that produce them.

Use it after the thinking, not instead

Which resolves most of this in practice.

Decide the answer, in three lines of your own notes, and then use the tool to express it.

That keeps the judgement where it belongs and still takes the tedium out.

It is also faster than it sounds, since three lines of notes is two minutes and the writing was never the slow part.

The order is the whole of the discipline: think, then produce, and never let the producing stand in for the thinking.

The same applies to reading

Worth extending, since summarising is the use most people have settled on.

Reading a contract slowly is how you notice the clause that does not sit right, in the same way that quoting slowly is how you notice the access problem.

A summary gives you the contents without the noticing, which is fine when you are deciding whether to read something and not fine when you are deciding whether to sign it.

So the summary is a way in rather than a substitute, which is the same rule stated from the other direction.

Where the document commits you to something, read the document.

The counter-case

Some thinking benefits from a starting point.

A blank page is its own obstacle, and a draft to react to sometimes produces better thinking than staring at nothing, particularly for people who find starting hard.

Reacting is easier than originating, which is a real and legitimate use.

And plenty of decisions are not close enough to matter, where any reasonable answer is fine and speed is worth more than deliberation.

Ask whether you know the answer before starting, decide in three lines, and use the tool to phrase rather than to conclude.

What to do

1. Ask whether you know the answer already.
2. If not, think first, on paper.
3. Write three lines of conclusion.
4. Then use the tool to express it.
5. Keep quoting and pricing yourself.
6. Notice the discomfort while you work.
7. Protect the tasks that produce judgement.

Step one is the whole of it, since almost every bad outcome in this area comes from producing an answer to a question that had not yet been decided.

What to tell clients about any of it is covered in telling clients you used it.

Frequently asked questions

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