What to do with the muchness

Photo by Ankush Rathi.

We're staring down a spreadsheet. This isn't a problem. We are tech people at heart. And we are still (still!) learning new Excel shortcuts. Even after decades of listing it as a ninja-level skill on our resumes.

The spreadsheet itself is not an issue. It's not even in Excel. It's a Google Sheet. Which actually makes several collaboration-based things easier. And the columns are pretty OK, too. They fit nicely on a single screen. It's the rows where things are getting intense.

Each row needs a decision. And each decision is the culmination of months (and sometimes years) of planning. We start at the top. OK, maybe if we reorder the rows. Maybe we can go from smallest decision to biggest decision? Or maybe not. That's getting overwhelming. Let's try the other order. Biggest to smallest, that way, if we run out of steam, it will be at the part where it's lower stakes. Hmm, maybe if we have a snack? One potato chip per decision?

You know it if you've been in this situation. There aren't enough potato chips in the world to get you to the bottom of the list. Because the people at Microsoft are sadists, and the people at Google copied them, the rows just keep going.

The only saving grace is that the list is for a project that's been several years in the making. The literal future of our business depends on it going well. And in the moments where we can step outside of the grind, the rows are good news. Each one represents big progress on a thing we care very deeply about.

In early 2021, we renegotiated our commercial lease. We got to a renewed lease but the combination of corporate overlord nonsense and massive economic uncertainty meant the lease was short. It goes until 2024. After that, we need another answer for where and how we're operating.

The spreadsheet holds the answer for what comes next.

Runnin', runnin', and runnin', runnin'

This story of our small business is also the story of every organization we've met over the past few years. We had things we couldn't control. We responded as well as we could given impossible circumstances. We were less insulated from economic bumps than we'd have liked. And we're trying to figure out what that means for the end of this year and beyond.

For our techie people, "figure it out" has meant layoffs and recalibrations of valuations. Followed by strongly worded board meetings with agenda items like "extending runway indefinitely" and "running the business like a business."

For our do-gooder nonprofit folks, "figure it out" has meant stretching already stretched funding even further. To support communities that didn't anticipate the impact of rising food costs, rising rents, and variable mortgages.

This ongoing undercurrent of uncertainty breaks one of two ways for organizations. Either, we're running as fast as we can toward clear targets. Or we're running as fast as we can without clear targets.

The difference between a crunch and a slog

Look, even in well-run organizations, work does not always come in nice, reasonable packets that land equally on every team. Clients sometimes need things in a hurry. Competitors sometimes surprise you. Economic changes sometimes hit hard. Some situations need you to run faster than expected. Even if you're in an organization with a five-year plan for the future, the future is not evenly distributed.

And so there will be times, for your team or your entire organization, when there is just a shit ton of work to do. When you're at the starting line of a Big Thing, staring it down as a team. The more junior people on your team might be excited about diving in. The more senior might be worried about the work hiding inside the work that we haven't uncovered yet. But everyone on your team knows that it's going to be a grind.

Sometimes that work is a crunch. A crunch is a pile of work that is being compressed by some external date or event. An announced release date. Black Friday. EOY. An announced release date on Black Friday to make our EOY numbers. You know. Crunch periods aren't inherently bad, though there are many, many bad versions of them.

There are industries that use Crunch as a term of art. Industries that assume intense, repeated, exploitative crunch periods in their work, where burnout, depression, and health issues are par for the course. To be clear: those are bad. A culture that relies on exploitation and burnout to accomplish unreasonable targets is abusive. Hitting a revenue goal or a launch date doesn't excuse that.

But crunches in general — periods when we need to work intensely to accomplish a thing — don't have to be toxic. They have a muchness, for sure. But when the duration is short and the purpose is clear, an otherwise high-functioning team will likely get on board.

Slogs, on the other hand. A slog is a crunch without an end. A pile of bugs or support tickets that isn't shrinking. A quarter of funding deferrals after five quarters of funding deferrals. A year of "constraints breed creativity," after a year of "do more with less." With all the less and no doing more. With all the constraints but none of the creativity.

Some of you are in a slog right now. And some of you have been in one for a while now.

Getting through

The rules of getting through a crunch are simple to spec out, even if they're hard to accomplish. As a boss in a crunch, your job is to manage the interplay of dates, workload, and capacity. Move dates to make room for the work. Reduce and re-prioritize work to make a clear and realistic path for your humans. Look after your humans on what remains.

Managing through a crunch is fundamentally a practice of care. It's what makes the pathological crunch cultures so toxic — the lack of care in those cultures is so obvious, it's structural. Whatever some individual boss may do, the systems of an organization like that are built to chew people up. Management is always a practice of care, always a balance of timelines, commitments, and humans — crunch just makes that clearer.

Getting through a slog is different. Because if you accept the hand you're dealt, you can't. Without an end point, the interplay you're supposed to be managing is broken. Just a monthly exercise of matching a constant-or-increasing workload against a constant-or-decreasing team, with no end in sight. It goes about how you'd expect.

We've talked to bosses in these spots. Inside sales managers who describe their team as a burnout gig. Customer success leaders who try to get anyone promising transferred off to some other department within 18 months to retain them. Team by team, those leaders are trying to define an end point. But what if it's your whole company in a slog?

Slogs need an end. If you don't want your organization described as a "burnout gig," then your people need to feel real progress towards a thing that matters. And when we get to that thing, you don't get to immediately move the goalposts. If we get to that point, we need to be able to do more with more for a change. We need to be able to raise our heads and lower our shoulders and take stock.

Whether you plan a quarter at a time or five years ahead, it matters to work on something that matters. And it matters to accomplish it. It matters to stare at that spreadsheet with every row marked COMPLETE. It matters to get the thing done so that you can put it down, and rest, and find some new thing that gets you genuinely excited. Otherwise what the hell was the slog for? In the immortal words of Ze Frank,

"And god let me enjoy this. Life isn't just a sequence of waiting for things to be done."

- Melissa and Johnathan