Your pencils are sharp enough

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Both our kids have grown up on brown noise. When our big kid was small, we were renting an apartment on top of a very loud, very late-night gamer. And by the time our little kid came along, it was already part of our "how to get kids to sleep" toolkit. We used to host full-on dinner parties with brown noise going outside the kids' rooms. They'd sleep through the whole thing. It's a neat trick.

Last week, we were all in a hotel room. The plan was to put the kids on a pull-out couch but anyone who has ever shared a bed with a sibling can tell you what happened next. The big kid complains the little kid is kicking. The little kid, beyond overtired, insists that diagonal is the only possible way she can fall asleep. Chaos ensues.

We grab the ipad, find the 12-hour brown noise track, and turn the volume up. Way up. The only answer is sleep. Everyone just needs to go to bed.

But because it's late at night and the ipad-grabber isn't paying 100 percent attention, the brown noise isn't at the start of the 12-hour track. It's a bit further in. Pretty soon, everyone is asleep. Kids. Parents. Everyone.

At 5am, the track rolls over. No longer the warm buzz of brown noise. Spotify had queued up Ke$ha, at full blast, "WAKE UP IN THE MORNING FEELING LIKE P DIDDY..."

One of us bolts out of bed toward the ipad, and narrowly avoids tripping over the teenager, asleep on the floor. She had moved there after being kicked one too many times on the pull-out couch.

And while it may not be clear from this story, we both love travel. As long-ago business travellers, we fell in love with travel. And as a long-distance romance, we fell in love, with travel. See what we did there?

Mission Impossible

Five years ago, we got invited to speak at a very cool event. We'd be working with dozens of early stage founders from multiple countries. And rather than being packed into a boardroom somewhere, it was hosted on an island in the Mediterranean. With, you know, space. It was an amazing opportunity for our tiny little business at the time. And did we mention that we love travel?

But then we started to do the math. On cost. On disruption to our work lives. To our home lives. On sleep deprivation and jet lag. It would have meant international travel with a toddler. There wasn't enough brown noise in the world to put that kid on a redeye. Particularly when the two of us would need to say coherent, engaging things to a room full of founders the next day.

We talked ourselves into believing that a thing we really wanted to do was impossible. And that belief became reality. So we declined. :/ And it ate us up. In the years since, we have pointed to that event as our white whale. This very cool thing that we never did. And might never get invited to do again. Because we thought it into the ground.

This happens a lot. Where there's work you want to do, or feel like you ought to do. Because it represents a cool opportunity. Or because it solves a problem that's been nagging at you for a long time. Or just because it sounds like fun. You probably have a list of those things kicking around somewhere. We certainly do.

But despite the reasons why you should do that work, you haven't done that work. You've analyzed it into a standstill. It's not all adventures on faraway islands, either. Some of it is pretty basic stuff. We've learned that there are two types of work that are the most prone to getting stuck like this. And there are different tools we've found helpful for getting them unstuck.

Two types of stuck

The first kind of work that tends to stall are these weirdo, one-off opportunities. The ideas that have a lot of intuitive appeal, but where it's hard to make a great business case for why. A new online series focused on connection and play. Finding a way to interrupt a dreadful conference nearby. Flying to speak to startup founders on an island in the Mediterranean.

With the weirdos, the thing that stalls them is the urge is to make them less weird. We push to define them more clearly, to wrap them up in some rational justification. To make it make sense. Because if it makes enough sense, maybe it will get picked up and funded and resourced and pushed through all on its own. But, almost by definition, they don't make sense. They are exploration, and what-if. Weirdos don't lend themselves well to cost-benefit analysis.

The second kind of work that consistently gets stuck, maybe more surprisingly, is gruntwork. The shitty, unloveable grind through the spreadsheets, clean up the salesforce data, scan the receipts, migrate the mailing list entries, reconcile quickbooks stuff that infuses a lot of knowledge work in the year 2023.

Even though this work is straightforward, and has a clear benefit, it stalls. Because when this kind of work is on the list, our first impulse is to try to outsmart it. Maybe someone's built a tool that automatically does this work. Maybe I should build a tool that automatically does this work. That will take more thought, though. And so it stalls.

Like, sure, sometimes it all works. Sometimes there is a tool that automates the grunt work away. Sometimes your intuition can be polished up into a 5-point business plan that is self-evident and bankable. But more of the time, in our experience, that work just sits on the list. It still matters. But it's stuck in analysis instead of moving to action.

Gruntwork-divided-by-3

We have a lot of cultural tools at RSG around getting important work unstuck. And for gruntwork, the one we reach for the most isn't automation, it's gruntwork-divided-by-3. It's a reflex at this point. As soon as we realize that important work has stalled because it will be a grind, one of us will say "wanna divide it by 3?" It's not a grand revelation — splitting gruntwork across multiple people makes it go faster. But as a cultural touchstone it's surprisingly useful.

First, it does make things go faster. A small group of people with a burndown list of gruntwork and a shared sense of purpose can get a shocking amount done between morning chips and lunch (or between lunch and chips-o'-the-afternoon). It's also an important signal — that the work matters, that solidarity matters, that we have shared goals and we have each other's backs. But maybe most importantly, dividing by 3 often makes the perceived effort fall below some psychological threshold. Where the initial lift was too heavy, now it's no big deal. And the result is that the work gets done. And the thing gets unstuck. This stupid simple trick works way better than you expect it to.

When it comes to the weirdos though, dividing by 3 won't help. When the work is poorly defined, or too early, or requires a big upfront commitment, there's no feasible way to break it down. For that you need a different tool. The tool we lean on when we're staring into the unknown. When we have a strong sense of what we need to do but aren't sure how to express what it is, or why it makes sense.

FILDI

We didn't invent Fuck It, Let's Do It. We learned it from Ze. It's a powerful tool but it's easy to misuse. FILDI doesn't mean that you don't care about the details, it means that you can't let them keep you from starting. FILDI doesn't mean anything goes, it just means that the important stuff has to get going. FILDI is the shove over the analysis threshold of "does this idea make sense?" It's a tool to get weird things unstuck.

Remember that island conference? Well, the thing about declining opportunities you really want to do is that you can say, "please keep us in mind for the future." And sometimes they do.

Earlier this year, those event organizers reached back out. Were we interested now? Our kids are older, but the costs of international travel and the interruption to our lives are the same. This time around, instead of should-we, we focused on how-might-we.

In a few months, if all goes according to plan, we will be there. And we will remember to start the brown noise at the beginning of the track.

FILDI.

- Melissa and Johnathan