Sleep on it

I had this reflection when I finished the book Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most, which brought up a different perspective to the concept of "Sleep on it" that I used to think about. In Adam Grant's book Think Again, he encouraged people to always "be lazy" and sleep on big ideas, since this gives people the mind space to rethink and reflect on the decision. In Effortless, the author's view was related but subtly different: he asked people to think about whether they are spending too much effort either solving the non-essential problem, or trying to solve the essential problem in an unproductive way.

At Meta, Moving Fast is one of the key values of our company, so "Sleep on it" sounds a little against that core value. However, what matters in the end is not the action of "moving fast", what really matter is that we are making rapid progress towards the right goal in the future. Under this interpretation, it's not only ok, but to some extent required for us to always sleep on a response, a decision or an execution, think / rethink through it, then take the action the next day.

I have always been leaning towards action, and I have had various failures, received various feedback on ruthless actions, so I had started to more systematically train myself to apply the "Sleep on it" technique. It takes 2 steps:

• Identifying the symptom that something doesn't feel right, or sensing that something is about to go wrong.
• Analyze the situation by asking myself through a set of questions. This forces me to slow down and rethink.

Combining the new perspectives from the Effortless book, I'm listing a few situations below where the "Sleep on it" technique would be useful.

When you might be overreacting to feedback

Symptom: Someone had provided a piece of critical feedback. You feel the surge of blood pressure, an urge, a necessity to either make an immediate action to take the feedback and correct the wrong, or you want to make a defensive statement to prove the other person wrong.

Analysis: Repeat the feedback in your brain. Ask yourself what the intent of the feedback is. Do they want you to take action or do they expect to see a different outcome? Would you feel differently if the feedback is from a colleague that you truly trust? What if the feedback is given using a more soft language?

Example: A tells B that they are not communicating, people don't have visibility into his/her work

• Reaction without sleeping on it: B accepts the feedback and starts doing wide status posting as well as N^2 1-1s with everyone that he works with such that people can't say he's not communicating. Outcome: B over committed to the communication feedback and his productivity massively dropped due to communication overhead.
• Reflection after sleeping on it: B thought about who are the key stakeholders that need to know the progress of their work. What is the best communication channel to have his work progress communicated and whether there is a super-communicator who he can delegate to such that he only needs to communicate with this interface.

When you think you have a brilliant idea

Symptom: Suddenly a spark lights up in your head and you come up with this brilliant idea that will solve a million dollar question that will lead to a big impact. You want yourself / your team to drop everything and jump on this idea since this will save the day.

Analysis: Force yourself write the idea down, decompose the idea into the goal, the problem and the solutions. Then ask the 3-level questions: What is my goal with this idea? What problems do I need to solve to get to the goal? What solution do I have to these problems? Then bounce the idea off a few trusted colleagues and ask the question: I'm I crazy? Did I miss anything that is obvious to you?

Example: Project X is making a good impact at the moment, it has a solid customer base and it continues to grow, the overall TL A suddenly had an idea that they believe will drive the project to the next level.

• Reaction without sleeping on it: A summons the whole project team and tell the team to drop the current customer support and go all hands on deck to work on the new idea. He told the team that "we need to be able to walk away from the current small success, or we will die a slow death". Outcome: The team puts the current project on hold and jumps on to investigate the new direction, and it turns out that the key technology that is needed for the new direction is not ready and will take at least 6 months to be developed. The team had to go back to the original plan but customer trust had already been hurt.
• Reflection after sleeping on it: A writes his idea down into a 1-pager, clearly defines the goals and the problems that need to be solved, then he brings this document to both his team as well his peers. He asks the team to align on the goal and look at the solution space, and he asks his peers whether the problem space has been fully expanded, whether he has had blind spot.

When you are trying too hard

Symptom: You are working long hours, very hard every single day. You are near burnt-out, but you still feel that you / your team is not meeting the expectations by the leadership or by the customers. Resentment builds up, and you are asking yourself why I'm working so hard but people seem to not appreciate my effort.

Analysis: List out all the activities that you / your team are doing, then ask the following question: what bad thing would happen if I/we don't do this item?Then ask Am I or Is our team the best team to work on this item, are we working on it just because we are asked to? Is there a better expert who can guide the development of this item? Have I / us talked to this person?

Example: Team X is a team in the middle, they have customers that expect them to deliver services and content. The services and content that team X works with is relatively new so the customers' requirements are largely based on intuition and the quantity is large. To be able to fulfill these requirements, a scaled system as well as new core technology needs to be built, at the same time, to establish some credibility, team X also needs to provide incremental deliverables to the customers. A, as the TL of team X is extremely exhausted.

• Reaction without sleeping on it: A tries to fulfill some requirements of all customers, and have his team to play whack-a-molly, the team is spread thin across several near-term engineering work and hacks just get the ball rolling. Outcome: the team works over-time, switching from one tedious work to another, however on the customer end, since all of them gets some support but none of them gets full support, they are all unhappy with team X's service, therefore constantly escalate the team to higher leadership.
• Reflection after sleeping on it: A sit down with each and every single customer to learn and understand how critical his team's service is to the customer teams. He also tries to understand whether the customer concretely understands what they want, or they are just giving speculative, hand wavy requirements. This helps A to prioritize the key customers only. Then A also looks into the work that the team is spending a lot of time doing and critically asks whether they have the expertise to do that. He quickly finds several project-skill mismatch, which enables him to find a better person to work on, or deprioritize the feature due to the lack of expertise.