Thoughts For The Week - 2025.09.21
A "To Move" list, Confidence and Talent, Irreversible vs Reversible Decisions
1. A “To Move” list rather than a To Do list
Daniel Kazandjian’s post on Minimum Viable Productivity proposes a small but important shift in how you can tweak your todo list. This involves breaking down your todo list and thinking about it under theses two questions:
What do I want to move?
Where do you want to move it?
Both of which can be answered on one physical piece of paper or in a simple notes tool. The key tweak is to focus on the action and a quick next step to move in the right direction.
Being productive means “moving the things you want to move in the direction you want to move them.”
It can be very tempting to procrastinate and end up wasting time setting up the perfect knowledge system for productivity. But actually a simpler tool and system can help support making faster decisions.
High-velocity Decision Making
80% of productivity is fast decision-making.
In order to move things, we need to know:
What those things are (roughly)
The direction we want to move them in (roughly)
“Roughly” because you don’t need 100% certainty. Good enough is better than perfect.
In fact, if you’re certain about 100% of your decisions you're taking too long to make them. An error rate of zero is a meta-error.
2. Confidence & Talent
Adlet Balzhanov’s post explores the relationship between confidence, talent and effectiveness.
As with the post above it highlights again the importance of taking action and moving forward under uncertainty. The cost of delay often exceeds the cost of perfection.
The tragedy isn't that these engineers lack talent. It's that they've optimized for being right instead of being effective. They've confused perfectionism with professionalism.
The confident engineer has learned a different lesson. They understand that most technical solutions are reversible. Most code can be refactored, and most mistakes can be fixed. They know that making progress is more important than being perfect.
Some decisions are irreversible (see below) and so should be treated with far more care. But the vast majority of decisions are not like this and so could be made faster.
This doesn't mean confidence excuses incompetence. The engineer who confidently ships broken code won't last long. But there's a sweet spot where average skills combined with high confidence creates outsized impact.
Imagine what you can then do when you provide skilled engineers with leadership skills and grow their confidence. This is what can then really drive a team forward.
3. Irreversible vs Reversible Decisions
Continuing on theme, Fran Soto’s post “How Software Engineers Make Productive Decisions (without slowing the team down)” does a deep dive into how to identify more quickly which decisions should be handled with more care and which ones are low risk and so can be made fast.
You don’t grow by being right once. You grow by making many decisions and handling the wrong ones well. Use the 3-question filter:
Impact if wrong
Ease of reversal
Fast mitigation with small blast radius
It’s critical to know what type of decision is being made so you can invest the appropriate amount of type analysing it.
The productivity benefit is knowing the difference before you start. Over-investing in reversible decisions burns time and morale. Under-investing in high-stakes calls burns trust and customer goodwill.
Have a great week.