Too busy to improve? - When the tyranny of busywork has you in a bind

28 Jul 2023

28 Jul 2023 by Luke Puplett - Founder

Every night for almost a year I dreaded going to sleep for fear of being awoken at 3am by the voices of the team in India charged with babysitting a critical system while it crunched its critical numbers for a very large company. The problem was so bad I had to rent an apartment in London near the office and live there away from my family in Sussex. And wake me up they did, several times a week, and because I was new to the company and its arcane problem domain I was rarely able to sort it out without waking up others on my team who were supposed to be having a rest week.

As people arrived for work to start their day of trading and making decisions, the system would usually be in the middle of a second run and we wouldn’t know if that was going to succeed for another few hours.

Technical Debt

The system was so unreliable and so critical that we never had the time to fix it properly and really tackle the root causes. The original thing, like so much enterprise software, was written in a terrible rush under an oppressive trade-floor regime by different people of different abilities at different times. It was bad. The code had few tests and was a ball of spaghetti.

When things get this bad, it simply repels the good engineers it needs. Worse, in financial companies, there’s usually significant friction in getting code changes into production, so it’s very hard to make the many small refactors needed to a codebase to keep the quality up.

But worse, the application’s continual neediness prevents anyone from having the time to sort it out.

Process Debt

One of the most common forms of dysfunction I’ve seen in 20+ years is the cruel bind where the bad way you’re doing something robs you of the time needed to make the changes to improve it.

Often, manual processes are simply time-consuming or legacy systems require so much firefighting and band-aiding that there's no bandwidth left to step back and implement real improvements. The current way of working becomes a local maxima - optimized given constraints, but far from the global maximum.

This applies to everything from finance firms crunching numbers overnight, to hospitals with messy patient intake processes, to recruitment businesses with manual back office processes. The time spent dutifully maintaining and barely improving the status quo robs us of the resources we need to dismantle and rebuild things properly.

We become convinced the only way forward is to optimize what we have. But optimization has diminishing returns. Each incremental gain becomes smaller while still consuming considerable effort. Real gains come from radical rethinking, not incremental fixes.

"Every great leap forward in your life comes from having the courage to remove a constraint that you once tolerated." - Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

This requires giving ourselves permission to slow down and take the time to find a better way. Paradoxically, slowing down is the only way to speed up over the long run. We have to be willing to take a step back and lose some short-term efficiency while we build a process that's far more efficient once implemented.

This could mean overhauling software, bringing in new tools, changing incentives, or throwing out legacy systems entirely. Often we need a totally fresh set of eyes, rather than those conditioned by years in the status quo.

Just as technical debt accrues when we cut corners on coding, process debt accrues when we cut corners on operations. The interest payments come due in the form of daily inefficiencies and frustrations that trap us in suboptimal workflows. We must pay down this debt by taking the time and headspace to build a better way.

It won't be easy or comfortable, but slowing down is the only way to speed up over the long haul. The reward will be processes that run smoothly and reliably with much reduced stress, giving us the space to turn our attention to continuous improvement and simply enjoying our working week.

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