Rework is one of the best books I have read. It introduced me to a new perspective that goes against what is considered normal. When I first started as an intern, I didn’t pay much attention to meetings, estimations, and working late hours. I thought these were just regular aspects of the job, part of the process. However, after reading the book, I began to see the problems it mentioned right before my eyes at different companies. I am writing this piece to summarize the aspects I liked about this book. Jason Fried and DHH really cooked with this one.
Interruption is the enemy of productivity
“Interruptions break your workday into a series of work moments”
“if you are staying late and working weekends, it is not because there’s too much work to be done. it’s because you’re not getting enough done at work. And the reason is interruptions.”
When I read these quotes, something clicked in my brain and reminded me of the times I spent at some companies. Let's say you start your workday at 9:00 AM, your cup of coffee beside you, your monitor looking great, and you get that first notification of the day: “Join the standup meeting.” Of course, you join the meeting, everyone waits 5 minutes for everyone to join, then everyone is asked in order what they did the day before, kind of like in middle or high school when the teacher collected homework from each student. I really did suck at that one, though, for sure. Your turn comes, and you let the team know you started your ticket and made small progress yesterday, thinking you can finish it soon.
The meeting is over, and now you are ready to destroy this ticket. You spend 30 minutes reviewing your solution from yesterday, investigating a bit more on what could be done better, almost locking in, and then you see that notification: “You have been invited to a meeting that starts in 30 minutes.” You look at it, add it to your calendar, and continue working until the meeting time. Now, you join the meeting, spend 30 minutes listening to things you don’t really know about and that could probably be covered over text or a 1-on-1 meeting. The meeting ends, but you realize something: you are not locked in anymore. It's gone, and guess what? Lunch break is coming up. You eat your carbs, everyone feels lazy afterward, and now it’s time to lock in again. You spend another hour trying to enter the lock-in mode, and you get another meeting notification, and it continues.
Interruption is the enemy of lock in. When meetings occur repeatedly, your task will take double or even triple the time. I’m not saying all meetings are useless, I’m just asking whoever sends a meeting invite to ask themselves: Is everyone REALLY needed? Can’t I just make a group and send a text? Maybe I can just meet with one person instead of seven?
Don't be a Hero
“if you already spent too much time on something that wasn’t worth it, walk away. You can’t get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.”
I wish someone had told me that earlier. It's not just for work but also for personal projects. When prioritizing something, you really have to ask yourself: Do I need to spend more time on this, given that I already spent hours on it? The answer will probably be no if you have a list of tasks to finish. I can definitely see how this approach might not work at a company, given that the tasks assigned are based on business needs. But if you're doing your own thing, then it really is an important consideration.
Your estimates sucks
"We humans are just plain bad at estimating"
If there's one thing I learned being an Arab, it's that we really do suck at estimating things in life, so you can imagine a work situation.
If your mom calls to let you know she's close by and might need help, she's actually a little far (probably 10 minutes), but you thought "close" meant 1 minute. When your friend calls and asks how far you are, you say 10 minutes away, but you just left your place.
On a serious note, guesstimating only happens when the task is huge. Tickets need to be broken down into smaller pieces; otherwise, the story points will increase every standup meeting, which is not a good look.
Make tiny decisions
“The more steam you put into going in one direction, the harder it is to change course. When you make tiny decisions, you can’t make big mistakes. These small decisions mean you can afford to change. There’s no big penalty if you mess up. You just fix it”
This is by far my favorite quote in the whole book. It's something I experienced at FreshBooks (great company and team, by the way). I was tasked with designing and implementing a new internal UI library for managing user-entered emails in the invoice section. They previously used an open-source library; however, the maintainers dropped support, and there were just too many bugs in it to continue using it.
At that time, I had grown a little bit and started taking a liking to iOS development, so this task sounded really great at first. But I realized three days in that I still didn’t know iOS development that well. The problem? I put too much effort into one direction, using UIScrollView and manually calculating the end of the view to scroll down and add new space, instead of just using... UICollectionView.
I put so much work into the first approach that I wasted time, and it was hard to change course since I made too many decisions based on a wrong choice. Thank God I was an intern, lol. After talking to a few engineers (Karen, Justin, and Vishal if you see this, I owe you a big one), the UICollectionView approach seemed the most perfect—and it was! I learned a lot developing this library, but it taught me to never put too much steam into one direction!
Don't confuse enthusiasm with priority
“The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth. What seems like a sure-fire hit right now often gets downgraded to just a nice to have by morning. And nice to have isn’t worth putting everything else on hold.”
Forget about formal education
“Too much time in academia can do you harm”
I have to agree with this quote. The chapter in the book dives into the topic in more detail, but generally speaking, academia has introduced a new generation of yappers who talk too much instead of being clear. What academia teaches is:
- The longer the document, the better.
- Formal tone is better than being conversational.
- Using big words is impressive.
- You need to write a certain number of words or pages to make a point.
This is something fundamentally wrong with the education system, to be honest. I understand the need for word limits and formal tone early in high school to teach students writing skills. However, when you're writing something that is full of big words and your goal is to hit the 10 pages mark to introduce an idea that can be understood in one paragraph, then something is wrong. Many people will just ask GPT to summarize it (maybe this post falls under that lol).