Got Legs

Time for another anniversary reflection. My goal back in October 2011 was to write once a week for year, with a couple of weeks off for holidays. Two years and 100 posts in I paused to consider how things were going and since then I've done the same every 50 posts or calendar year. Today is post number 550.

I am regularly asked how I manage this. It helps that I like writing and find it valuable to get my ideas straight, record experiences, and document my thinking and learning but mostly, I think, it's because I've made it my habit.

Seth Godin calls it showing up:

When we commit to a practice, we don’t have to wonder if we’re in the mood, if it’s the right moment, if we have a headache or momentum or the muse by our side. We already made those decisions.
...
Outcomes are important ... But the outcome isn’t the practice, the practice leads us to the outcome. Find work worth doing, and begin there.

When I think an approach is valuable I'll make it my default practice, even if others are not working that way, can see downsides, and are sceptical about the potential upsides. I wrote about this in Exploring It!

When I commit to a change, I'll often try to apply it consciously everywhere that I sensibly can. I don't want for the perfect opportunity to arrive, I just dive in. This has several benefits: (a) practice, (b) seeing the change at work in the places it should work, and (c) seeing how it does in other contexts.

That's not to say that I won't look at costs, seek efficiencies and improvements, or give any consideration to how my preferences fits into existing practices. All of those things are key and I'm liable to experiment a lot around whatever I'm trying.

I'm also driven by context so the situation can always trump the practice.

What I've found, over the years, is that having some visible way of approaching things, some reasons for that approach, and some evidence of its overheads and benefits can help to move things along.

To give one example, when I started at Ada I began writing how-to pages on the wiki for tasks that I had to research, had many steps, required a brain dump from a colleague, or depended on something unexpected. I made a category for them and, as they grew, subcategorised them as well.

After a while, I could point people at them when they had the same problem. Then others just found and started to use them, and add to them, and ask about updating them when we made process or product or infrastructure changes, and started automating checklists that had developed inside them.

I took care to try to write the pages so that they have clear steps, are concise, link to other sources of truth rather than repeat them, and separate the how, what, and why. This makes for easier consumption and less maintenance. (And another of my practices is to fix pages that I find have fallen out of date at the point I find them rather than leave a comment addressed to no-one or simply ignore it altogether.)

I show up with activities that I believe return value on the investment I make in them.

In my experience this is an approach that has legs.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/o6ybaX

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