Ryan Singer writes about project and time management issues that I’ve been experiencing lately. He describes two states of every project: uncertainty and certainty, or “figuring things out” and “making it happen.”

Ryan describes it like this:

Work is like a hill with two sides. There’s an uphill phase of figuring out what to do and how to approach the problem. That’s the climb. After you reach the top, there aren’t anybody [sic] ruinous unknowns. You can see down to the other side and finish executing. It’s straightforward to estimate and finish the work from that point.

As far as I see it, the hardest thing about the first half of every project is making sure that everyone on a team is communicating constantly as tiny design decisions can have enormous, cascading effects on an engineer. I think that’s something I’ve always struggled with since I just want to get to the “making it happen” part as soon as humanly possible. It also goes back to something Geoff wrote a little while back about setting good expectations before and during the project process.

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