Hiding Place: Check

I looked at my to-do list this week and realized I had built myself a very nice place to hide.

Everything on it was real work. Follow-ups, edits, scheduling, a handful of small fixes. All of it legitimate. All of it checkable. None of it the thing.

That’s the trouble with tasks. A task can be finished. A mission? Not so much. Checking a box pays you immediately, a little hit of progress right there in the moment. A mission pays in months, maybe, and only if you were right. So given the choice, and we are given the choice every single morning, we reach for the boxes. Not because we’re lazy. Because we’re hiding, and a full list is excellent camouflage.

The costume works in the other direction too. Stack enough tasks on top of each other, give the pile a project name, and it starts to look like a mission.

I know because I’ve sewn that costume myself before.

At a previous gig I ran a go-to-market motion I was proud of at the time. It had everything a launch is supposed to have. Sequenced emails. A one-pager. Enablement. A checklist that got checked all the way down. It felt like momentum, and momentum is a very convincing feeling.

What that motion never had was the question underneath it: is this even the feature worth this much of us?

In hindsight, the answer was no. The time belonged to a different feature entirely, and to a much more drastic prioritization of the actual initiatives instead of the tasks orbiting the first one. We executed beautifully on the wrong bet. Nobody noticed, because every box was checked, and checked boxes are what reviews are made of. (Thankfully it was one of our most successful releases, but I knew I could point the success to only a couple checked boxes; not all of them.)

Stay Positive & Tasks Are Receipts; Missions Are Bets