Just Do the Dishes

If you want something done, do it.

Don’t debate who should do it; do it yourself.

Don’t debate whether it should get done; do it and see.

Don’t spend time on “process”; work on the “content”.

Just fix the (data) table

I run a data science team at work. Recently, a data warehouse table that describes our customers was suddenly missing location information.

No big deal, stuff happens. The root cause was a change in how different CRM address fields were being used. You can imagine the fix: There’s an ETL pipeline somewhere that needs to anticipate location information being in either of two possible sets of fields.

What would be a reasonable time-to-resolve? Maybe an hour? A day or two if there is something tricky?

It’s been 3 months, still not fixed.

The actual effort to implement the fix hasn’t ballooned. It would take a data engineer a couple of hours, from git checkout -b to production. The data engineering team has said as much.

Instead of fixing the issue, a new product leader wanted to use the issue to discuss a bunch of process stuff. Should we use Jira to submit issues to the team? What should be the SLAs? How will we prioritize which issue to fix? Is this even an issue?

We’ve spent 1000x the time needed for the fix to design a process for solving the issue.

Why didn’t we just fix the table and move on?

Just do the dishes

I shared a house with ~20 friends for a couple of years in college. We all had a day when we were supposed to clean up the kitchen after dinner, including the dishes.

Of course, not everyone is perfectly reliable.

A housemate and I would try to kindly nudge when it seemed like someone was dropping the ball on their day. “Hey, did you know today is your dish day?”

Sometimes it worked, most of the time it didn’t: “Yeah, I just have to finish this paper though.” “Oh, I need to leave to make it to band practice. Sorry!” Okay, valid. We can help - we’ll knock out the dishes this time.

And then one day we changed tack. Instead of nagging, we just did the dishes when someone else didn’t. I don’t know why we changed, we just did.

It was awesome. The kitchen looked great. No awkward confrontations. We spent less time cleaning than we had previously spent nagging. We were all genuinely happier. The work that mattered had gotten done.

Content vs. process

Now I catch myself all the time: “Shouldn’t I just do the dishes?”

• “Hey, have you made those updates to the job description?” has become “Hey, I had some time and took a pass, what do you think?”
• “Did you update that SQL transformation?” is now “We gave it a shot, any feedback on our PR?”
• “Shouldn’t this be another teams’ responsibility?” became “We got it done!”

I think the distinction is similar to the popular Steve Jobs content vs. process quote.

When you start working on process (e.g., who? by when? in what order?), you stop working on content. It’s the content that matters.