About a year ago, I wanted to become a certified lifeguard.1 Before I could take the course, learn the skills, take the test, and get certified, I had to take a pre-test.
The pre-test consisted of a 300-yard continuous swim, a timed 10-lb brick retrieval, and treading water for two minutes without using my arms.
I’ve always loved being in or near water. Spend enough time with me and I’ll tell you how I grew up swimming in Lake Superior2, or we might get talking about canoeing, or we’ll talk about the sound of waves on the shore. I was never a competitive swimmer3 and never did distance swimming, but I have spent enough time in the water and am in good enough overall shape that the pre-test didn’t worry me. Much, anyway.
And so, the evening of the assigned Sunday, I headed to the city pool to take my pre-test.
In the work world, we have projects, launch dates, and tasks.
Sometimes we get to choose them. Often, they’re assigned to us.
There were about 25 of us at the pre-test. Most of the group were teenagers.4 Some were clearly experienced swimmers, judging by their build, their racing swimsuits, and their really cool tinted goggles. I was not surprised to be the oldest person there. I was surprised that there were several people who did not appear to be in great swimming shape there.
There weren’t enough lanes in the pool for everyone to do the 300-yard swim at the same time. I wasn’t in the first group, so I got to watch. As I expected, the obvious swimmers cruised through the swim in no time, kick turns and all, not even breathing hard when they finished. And, as I had guessed, a few people struggled.
Fortunately, there is no time restriction. You just need to swim 300 yards, with a maximum of 45 seconds of rest. So even folks that struggled or “came in last” passed that part of the test.
When we’re lucky at work, we know what we’ll be judged on.
We know the software needs to meet these requirements and launch on this date. We know we need to make $100,000 in sales every month. We know the house we’re building needs to have three bedrooms, two bathrooms, meet building code, and have green siding.
Sometimes we don’t, or what we’re judged on changes over time.
My family usually eats dinner together.5 On this particular Sunday, we had chicken tacos.
I knew I was headed to my pre-test, so I had planned to eat light. Just one taco.
So I may have made my taco a bit more full than usual. Swimming is hard work, and with a few hours before the pre-test, I wanted to have enough fuel not to run out of energy and bonk.
But after we all ate, there was one tortilla left all alone and unwanted, so I had a second taco. Delicious!
That second taco was very much on my mind as the first group finished their swims.
At work, it’s common to be assigned to a project. You’re going to build the new integration. She was just assigned to the Smith account. He’s been asked to come up with a new desk arrangement.
Those projects are usually in addition to whatever regular work you have.
That’s actually a good and normal thing, because it makes you get better at your regular work. You learn to do it faster when you have to. What used to take you four hours, you learn to do in two, so you have time for your project. You compress your regular work, but it still gets done.
There are some things that don’t compress.6 The one-hour all-company town hall meeting is going to take an hour.7 A good, efficient bug triage process might be as compressed as possible already. Checking the escalated support queue once an hour takes only a few seconds, but it happens every hour—and if there is a support request waiting, it takes time to deal with that.
Some things can be deferred instead of compressed. If it turns out work doesn’t have to be done, or doesn’t have to be done now, deferring it can free up plenty of time.
But everything that can’t be deferred or compressed takes up some attention, even when a new and exciting project comes along.
It was my group’s turn. I climbed into the water, next to a high school kid that resembled Clark Kent, and was definitely one of the experienced swimmers.8 I reminded myself that speed didn’t count. I knew my natural tendency would be to race him. I knew I would lose that race, and might even end up running out of steam before I’d hit 300 yards.
Twelve lengths.
Six trips down, six trips back.
As much time as I needed.
Slow and steady.
Then we were off, and I raced the first lap. I couldn’t help myself. I did pretty well, if I say so myself. I didn’t win, but I didn’t get smoked. I grabbed the wall, turned around, and kicked off. Now I’d slow it down. No goggles, no ability to kick turn, so no way to keep up.
Eleven lengths left.
I kept my eyes ahead, focused on my own swim. If I looked to the right or left9, I’d want to race, and that would be the wrong thing to do.
About four or five lengths in, I had a sinking10) realization.
Digesting tacos is an incompressible process.
Digesting tacos is not a task that can be deferred.
Parts of work that cannot be compressed or deferred will still happen, even when a project is assigned and important.
If the service you’re building has an outage, you will defer your project until the outage is resolved. If a report needs to be prepared weekly to maintain regulatory compliance so the business can continue to operate, you’ll make sure that report gets done even if it means delaying the project.
Yup, “even if it means delaying the project”.
Sure, you might try to compress the project work. That’s fine.
Failing to plan around foreseeable incompressible or non-deferrable work when planning out a project is a mistake. It leads to late projects and quality issues. It puts a sneaky tax11 on your next project.
Not even halfway into my swim, my arms felt tired. Worse, I could feel how taco digestion was pulling important resources (i.e., oxygen) from my muscles. My breathing started to get ragged.
Not cool, second delicious chicken taco.
But I kept going. Hitting the halfway mark was both encouraging (halfway there!) and discouraging (halfway there, and I’m feeling like this?).
After the ninth length, at the 225 yard mark,12 I grabbed the wall but didn’t kick off. I just couldn’t catch my breath. I breathed out, hard, a few times, trying to get all the carbon dioxide out of my lungs.13 Four or five hard breaths out, with only a short breath in—maybe five seconds on the wall. As I kicked back off, I noticed the instructor watching me, probably checking whether I was taking too long or giving up.
Only a few lengths to go. Slow. Steady. Priority on breathing. Next priority on digesting. Third priority is keeping the arms and legs moving.
I finished the swim..
It was the second worst eating-before-exercising experience of my life.
We moved on to the two-minute legs-only tread and the brick retrieval. Those were easy.14
Two minutes of gentle kicking to keep afloat, even after the swim, was pretty light work.
The brick retrieval was a speedy almost-length, a surface dive to the bottom, a kick to the surface, and a no-arms backstroke almost-length return. It was not enough to start competing with tacos for oxygen.
The bigger the project, the more it is affected by incompressible background work and work that cannot be deferred. There are more chances for problems or other priorities to crop up. Energy and enthusiasm can dip. The reoccurring cost of task switching starts to add up and become a drag.
And although it’s a whole separate post, it’s worth noting that bigger projects are harder to estimate accurately.
It’s easier to fit smaller projects in with the regular work.
I passed the pre-test.
Nearly everyone did.
We earned the privilege of taking the lifeguarding class.
But I very nearly did not pass. That second taco nearly sunk my chances to become a lifeguard.
It’s not intuitive that putting a small amount of routine work “in progress” could jeopardize a large project. But it can.
When a system is near its limit, adding a little bit more to it can cause non-linear behavior.15 That’s fancy talk for “you just added 1% more work, but now it’ll all take 15% (or 150%, or 1500%) longer.”
I’m a certified lifeguard now. My certification is good for two years.16
If I need to do a swimming pre-test before my renewal class, you better believe I’m going to make sure I’m not busy digesting when I need to swim!
At work, how often do we learn from our mistakes? Or examine our successes, especially the difficult ones?
Sure, it might be harder to figure out what the real cause of an issue was than “ate too many tacos, started running out of air”. And the majority of organizations I’ve observed don’t invest into understanding causes. I’ve observed even less investment into well-considered experiments to address those causes.17
The number of work items in progress, especially routine or required tasks that don’t often get tracked, is remarkably predictive of the ability to complete work as planned (date and quality both).
At the time of my pre-test, I was probably capable of doing one thing at a time. I could swim 300 yards, or I could digest tacos. Trying to do both at the same time predictably led to struggling. I swam slower than I wanted to, felt miserable while doing so, and nearly gave up entirely.
Some work items can’t be deferred. Digesting tacos, for example. For a software team, the equivalent of digesting tacos might be patching security issues, maintenance work, or operations work.
It’s a bad idea to ignore your stomach full of tacos.
It’s also a bad idea to ignore your baseline work items when planning to add new projects or tasks.
If you aren’t sure how to get new work done while also covering your baseline or routine work, you’re not alone. I offer coaching for managers that can help you (yes, you!) manage your team’s workload so everyone feels less stressed, and nobody runs out of air.
- I’ve always wanted to know how to save someone from drowning. It’s one of those generally useful life skills. Besides that, I wanted to be able to volunteer as lifeguard for the overnight camp my church puts on. After being a counselor for many years, I wanted to get a different perspective on camp. And because I’d be around, I’d be able to help other counselors if they needed it. [↩]
- Often in a conversation a bit like this one. You: “gee, that pool is cold!” Me: “I grew up swimming in Lake Superior, so I’ll give it a try!” Lake Superior is a very large lake in a cold climate. Large parts of it freeze in the winter. While it warms up over the summer, it never gets warm. Especially below the first couple feet of depth. It’s cold! [↩]
- That’s a lie. There was that one city swim meet when I was about 10 that I did great in. And it’s pretty common for mini swim races to break out any time I’m in the water with kids or friends or friends’ kids. But in terms of actual training and regular racing as part of a team, it’s entirely accurate. [↩]
- Makes sense! Lifeguarding is an excellent summer job. [↩]
- We’re old fashioned like that. (Serious advice: eat dinner together occasionally, no technology. Turns out it’s good for your family.) [↩]
- Water, for example, is incompressible. (Well, pretty close, anyway.) You can move it around, but you can’t make it take up a smaller volume. [↩]
- Or more. Most folks run over their assigned time slot. [↩]
- We had chatted while we waited. He wasn’t a swim team kid, but he and his dad swam laps together regularly. [↩]
- To be specific, it’d be looking to the right on my odd-numbered lengths, and to the left on the even-numbered lengths. When we lined up to start, I was in the far left lane of the pool. [↩]
- Not literally. No sinking. No drowning. (Wouldn’t that be embarrassing? [↩]
- In software, this tax is sometimes called “technical debt”. I have some irritation with the term. Specifically, it’s evolved into a sneaky way of shifting blame onto engineers. The debt is “technical”, after all! The causes, though, might lie with “the business” giving artificially tight deadlines, insufficient support (e.g., not answering questions promptly), or throwing last-minute changes into a project without allowing timeline changes. This is a windmill at which I will continue to tilt. [↩]
- In my journal, I wrote “about 200 yards in”. It was either 175 yards (7 lengths) or 225 yards (9 lengths), because it was at the deep end of the pool, which means odd-number lengths. And I’m almost positive it was 225 yards. [↩]
- Turns out, your body doesn’t care much about sensing oxygen until you become hypoxic. Your body cares a lot about sensing carbon dioxide levels. Crazy but true! When breathing gets ragged during exercise, the “out of breath” feeling is sometimes because there’s too much carbon dioxide in your lungs and your bloodstream. The natural physiological response is to try to take more air in. But if your lungs are already full of carbon dioxide, breathing in doesn’t help much—you’re pulling in some oxygen, but you’re definitely not getting the carbon dioxide out. [↩]
- You might say they were “a piece of cake”, but I was not in the mood for cake. [↩]
- This link illustrates the opposite scenario. Instead of adding work, it adds a bank teller and the average customer wait time plummets. But take the scenario in the link and imagine you started with two tellers and removed one, and you’ll see that non-linear behavior. [↩]
- Well, closer to one at time of writing. Two years from when it was issued. [↩]
- Kneejerk reactions without understanding the issues? Set-it-and-forget-it magical solutions? Those I have seen in abundance! [↩]
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