Go small and go home

🌑 Tonight is a new moon, meaning it’s effectively invisible to us because we’re facing its shadow side. Two new moons ago, we could see its outline thanks to April 8’s total solar eclipse.
Issue #92: audio-only meetings, the end of a 40-year ban on gay clergy, and the art of detachment
By Harris Sockel

A few years ago, I came across a Medium story on the art of “ruthless prioritization.” It’s written in the context of deciding what to build next at a tech company (in this case, Shopify), and features a few tried-and-true principles: focus on what’s most valuable to customers, and ship things before they’re perfect. (As another tech lead on Medium writes: 90% of MVPs are overbuilt.)

It sounds so simple in theory: Just do the important things, and do them fast! In practice, it’s much harder. I’ve been on teams that yo-yo between big, shiny projects, each of which seem equally important — and deprioritize the smaller issues that might be easier to fix.

Design researcher Lindsey M. West Wallace calls this “the unsexy problem problem.” Here’s the gist: Brilliant people are drawn to shiny, complex problems — yet the problems that matter to most people often require boring (or expensive, or expensive and boring) solutions. She quotes an engineer saying, “I’ve gotten standing ovations from customers twice and both times it was for the most boring nothing features.”

A backend developer on Medium summed this up nicely a few years ago: “Go small and go home.” Fix the tiny things that need fixing, even if doing so isn’t glamorous or particularly intellectually stimulating. This principle applies to so many aspects of work and life: Not all problems (or solutions) are sexy. But the small, boring ones are sometimes the most meaningful to get right.

What else we’re reading

• Product designer Sean Dexter argues that Zoom’s interface is making all of us exhausted by lowkey pressuring us to go camera-on (there’s scientific evidence to back him up). Dexter believes audio-only hangouts with your coworkers, sort of like Discord channels, will be the future of remote work.
• Six years ago, when Keith Turner was ordained as a pastor, he was in the closet and living in fear. According to Methodist law, being gay made him ineligible to preach: “I endured the stares, the gossip, the coldness, the covert, subversive attempts at getting me removed as pastor,” he recalls. Last month, as Turner describes in a moving personal account on Medium, the entire denomination finally struck down that 40-year-old ban.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about mindful detachment

A note on stepping back from your internal monologue: “Our thoughts are just thoughts. They are not the ultimate truth or reality.”

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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