The small things matter
Slay the dragon when it’s the size of a kitten.
How’s your team doing? Do they know where to share their work? Do they have faith that what they’re looking at is the latest version? Are the folders well named and populated, or are they baron… the relics of an unsustained spur of energy to get organised?
Do all the ppt’s have ‘copyright 2014’ at the bottom?
These may be small things, but in many ways, they are the most important.
The small things matter — doing what you say you’ll do. Sharing your work. Translating what you heard into something others can understand. Delivering on time. Asking what that acronym means. Sticking to naming conventions. Version control. Pipeline hygiene. Putting your expense claims in on time. Meeting minutes documented and distributed. Following up on actions. Asking for things that were promised.
Or do you let your weekly status report slip by a day… every week?
Do you have some things in sharepoint, and some on your desktop? And you’re not sure which one is where?
Do you have a sensitive financial report sitting on your home PC unprotected?
Have you run the latest software update?
The small things line up to where we are going. Set a goal, know where you’re going, and then walk towards it. Google maps tells us exactly how to get there, it’s up to us to make sure we follow the route. Although, it doesn’t warn us about the dragons.
You miss a status report, or a deliverable by a day… the dragon is small. Slay it. Don’t let it get bigger. Too many small things missed turns a singer into a choir.
We’ll spend 80% of our day attending to small things. If 80% of our day is spent disorganised, chaotic… where does it lead? A distracted mind gets more distracted.
Chaos attracts more chaos. Those missed deadlines, each time just by a day or two, leads to distrust… and project escalation. And noise. Eventually you just end up blocking your ears instead of silencing the choir. The dragon is too big and you just put out flames… instead of being able to kill the dragon.
Every tech professional knows where I’m coming from. Meetings about meetings. Noise about noise.
The small things matter. The more organised you are, the more organised you become. The better you deliver, the better you get at delivering. Ownership. Context. Responsibility. The worse you deliver the simple things, the worse you get at delivering the simple things. If you can’t do the simple things, how can you do the big?
That’s when the false heroism starts. The professional that stays up 3 nights in a row and pretends to be there hero, neglecting the noise they created in the 3 months prior by not following up on small commitments. A unified well organised team doesn’t need the hero. The hero is required because of someone else’s doing, or their own. I’ve been the hero because of both of these, and it’s always been because of the small things.
Organised environment. Organised mind. You can get an organised mind by creating an organised environment. Start simple. Tidy your room. There’s a reason why the military enforces discipline starting with your own home.
The small things matter.
