You can’t argue that breaking down a complex task into it’s simplest components is the best way to tackle a problem. And yet too often, we want to look at it as one, huge assuming mass and deal with it then and there. Not every fire needs a firehose, sometimes it needs smaller, more tactile options to resolve. Sometimes we need to take a step back, write them down and then move forward with them.
In comic books, we call it the gutters – the spaces between panels where the reader envisions the transition, things happening, work being down, and actions happening. In software, this is the space between the tickets you are assigned to work on and the code you write. The gutter exists, stuff happens between those two things, thinking emerges, design happens, and we don’t always know what it all is, but it happens there – it’s…
I have a similar picture from when my children were young, we had bought new chairs and had all these boxes so we made this weird box fort in the basement that they could draw on, hang out in, eat, have snacks, etc, etc. It’s where creativity is born.
I’ve held off on adding new categories to my posts for a while now as I generally think what you do comes down to behaviors of work that you do, but I know I’ve been writing about different areas of work that I’d like to bring more to the forefront and I’m also looking to change some of the content that I’ll be writing about. You’ll start seeing new categories such as Team (for remote,…