The Perimeter Is Spotless

Some problems are attractive because they have a clear finish line to run toward.

You can reorganize your garage or fix the naming convention in some system. At some point you stand back and there it is: done.

Other, more intractable problems don't come with a clear finish line. It can feel miles away.

Does somebody important need to change their mind? Are we still doing this because it works? Is this the real problem?

So I understand the appeal of cleaning the garage.

I've felt the specific comfort in sweeping the floor. You can know the real question is whether the overall direction makes sense, and still move that dust out of there. The floor was genuinely dirty, leaves everywhere; fixing it is real work. You can even be completely right about it needing a good sweep.

But, afterward, sometimes the wider picture still makes no sense. You might be in the wrong part of the house.

Cultures tend to set. People have their eyes and ears on what is rewarded.

When the easier problem starts winning often enough, and the hard problems tend to involve commitment, people know what's probably going to lose in your average problem cage match.

And anyway, smaller, let's call them adjacent problems are friendlier. They can be improved without forcing the larger issue, the one on the outskirts of your sight, to resolve.^[1]

You might also have good reason to stay close to the small stuff. Sometimes the larger decisions around you have a short half-life.

A priority is announced, and reality rearranges itself around that. Then something else changes, and something else, and you look up and see that priority in the dustbin. Nobody's even working on it.

After enough rounds, it's hard not to notice how seriously a decision deserves to be taken around here. Maybe we won't rearrange the entire garage because someone said we're turning it into a gym. Where will the cars go?

People learn which decisions will stick.^[2]

Or, maybe they know they might need a return, so they hold on to the box for a while. The solution to a hard problem or an entirely new direction can feel a little like a large purchase you haven't decided to keep yet. Go ahead and use it. Do NOT recycle the packaging. Not yet. In three weeks, we might want something a little different.

Is this cynicism? From a distance, maybe, but I think not. Up close it more often seems sensible. If you keep seeing decisions reopen, keep watching "final" decisions change shape again, why wouldn't you add a little slack into the system?

Bigger questions are vulnerable precisely because they're slow to reveal if your answer was right. Meanwhile, smaller problems offer little, same-day receipts of your competence. Sweep the floor. Fix the thing.

Look at that. Better already.

Work can naturally wander toward the edges of the bigger problems. At the edges, answers come faster and are less likely to be rendered pointless by whatever is around the corner.

Eventually the big problems are still sitting there, but now you could eat off the perimeter. It's that clean.

Small steps matter too. We have to get going. Small steps can be pieces of a larger solution. You can't rebuild a house all at once, and sometimes sweeping the floor is genuinely what has to happen before anything else can. In the moment, the harder question to suss out is whether whatever small thing currently occupying your attention is taking you further into the problem or giving you somewhere nearby to be busy. Does the floor need this sweep today?

Might be that it does, but you have to know where that finish line is. There is a difference between breaking a hard problem into small pieces and continually finding smaller problems near that same hard problem. Never easy to know just which one you're doing.

Say you have sleep trouble. It's a real issue for you. You can buy a sleep tracker, blackout curtains and some vaguely Scandinavian or Japanese pillow. All reasonable, small steps to fix your sleep.

But if you continue to go to bed at 12:45 and wonder why you're tired? Was that stuff the right stuff? Those blackout curtains may help a little as you drift to sleep at 1:30 and it's already pitch black out. That pillow could be terrific. But there's a larger problem here, because you have work in the morning.

Sports teams do versions of this too. Change the formation, move somebody just a few yards up and to the left, spend a week on set pieces, and then discover or rediscover the slightly less entertaining possibility that some key spots on the roster are simply not good enough. You might want to score goals, but you have no striker.

The smaller problems at the periphery grab our attention because they deserve our attention. Their legitimacy is a trap. You can spend all day doing useful work and still avoid the thing that matters most because you're very rarely choosing between a useful big-ticket item and useless peripheral work. The choice is far subtler, between bite-sized useful work that can be completed and a larger problem that will require a price you don't know you want to give: time and money, uncertainty, patience. Conflict. So, you could work on something that comes with the possibility of being done this week versus that larger effort that would probably still be sitting there at Christmas, anyway, asking a question: was what we did even right?

If you're completing work, is that avoidance? Hard, hard to know. But if you're in perpetual motion but feel like you have no idea if you're getting very far, I'd bet yeah, it's avoidance. Ask yourself if the garage floor is spotless. Then ask yourself if you're sure you're in the right building.