just do it
We have projects that never die. They just orbit.
They get discussed, then pushed back, then deprioritized, then they come back next quarter like nothing happened. Each time we plan again. New doc, new angles, same outcome. Nothing ships.
The strange part is not that we are slow. It’s that we are busy. Meetings, docs, comments, rewrites. It feels like progress. But if you zoom out, nothing actually changes. If we took the time spent talking about the work, we could have done the work twice.
There is always a reason not to start. Edge cases. Dependencies. What if this breaks. What if users don’t like it. All valid, but none of them actually move things forward. At some point, thinking just becomes a very comfortable way to avoid doing.
The difference is not intelligence. It’s tolerance for being a bit wrong. Some people ship something small, see what happens, adjust. Others want to be correct before they begin. They rarely begin.
And the real cost is not bad decisions. It’s no decisions. Not wrong work, no work.
I don’t really have the power to change this yet, but it’s becoming hard to ignore the pattern. The same projects keep coming back, and we treat them like they need more thinking, when in reality they probably just need a first version.
Maybe the bar should be simpler. Could we build a rough version in a week? Could we put it in front of real users and learn something concrete? If yes, it’s probably worth doing instead of discussing it again.
Most things don’t need another strategy doc. They need a first version.