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canyonwalkerMy grandfather used to enjoy doing the crossword puzzle. He'd sit with the newspaper in his favorite armchair every evening after work, and after breakfast on Saturday and Sunday, working the daily puzzle until it was complete. At least that's what I'm told. My grandfather passed away when I was an infant, so I never saw him that I have any memory of.
I'm also told that while my grandfather finished the crossword puzzle every day— he'd finish it all in one sitting, with a pen— his way of "finishing" it was not what you might think. If he didn't know the answer to a clue, he'd put in a guess. He didn't look things up in a crossword solvers' dictionary or ask his wife or older kids for help. And if the letters didn't line up, oh well. His definition of done was "a letter in every box". They didn't have to be the right letters; there just had to be something in every box.
I was reminded of that "solution" today when I was updating my opportunities in Salesforce.com. I have a timeslot reserved on my calendar every Friday late afternoon for Salesforce care and feeding. I make sure all my records are up to date, with accurate brief notes about status. My boss regularly thanks me for being so on top of this, as the fields I update are columns in reports that sales leaders scrutinize. When a VP challenges him about an account I'm working on, he's got the answer right there, and the VP can see it, too.
So, how is this like my grandfather's "an answer in every box" nonsense? It's not... so far. The status details are genuinely important. I strive to keep them as accurate, as lucid, and as concisely written, as possible. Where I fret I'm adopting my grandfather's nonsense— writing "an answer in every box" even if the answer is hokey— is with another field my boss told me is also important now, a link to where detailed notes are kept. That's my sales organization's latest weaksauce solution for the problem that it's been years since we had a single, standard place for keeping customer notes.
Out of the ~50 opportunities with my name on them, half so were easy to enter links for. That's because I've been taking notes on them, in our old standard location. It's easy to copy the link into Salesforce... and the link leads to a real trove of data. I did those a few weeks ago.
The next quarter of the opportunities, there was a location for notes I could find but no real content there... or the latest notes were from years ago. In my second pass through the list I entered those links. The empty boxes in the column in the report were galling, and this filled them in.
Today the last 1/4 or so of the opportunities in my report were still missing values. I'd left these blank the longest because there is genuinely nothing I've been able to find for them. They're opportunities I've just inherited from someone else, or they've just been created— and with their creator not sharing notes anywhere.
Today I decided I would fill in that last 1/4 of the list. I spent time creating new pages in the old standard note system, the one that was the shared standard when I started at the company years ago but has been abandoned by almost everybody in favor of fractured standards or no standard at all.
I made the pages I created look pretty. In addition to populating each new page with the company name and URL, I pasted their logo and a one-sentence blurb about each company that I shameless stole from their homepages. There's no useful content on those pages, but they are pretty. Another report scrapes them for logo images and shows those... so, hey, it looks like real work!
Yes, it looks like real work, but is it just busywork? I was conflicted about that this afternoon. I decided finally that it both it's not busywork.
Sure, right now it's just metrics engineering. I'm doing just enough work to juice my metrics. There's no actual content behind them... yet. That's why it seems like busywork but also why it's actually not. At some point there will be content in all those pages. At some point I'll engage on each of those opportunities and document my work. Having created locations for it now means I won't have to create locations for it later. I am doing real work that I'd have to do later anyway. I'm just pulling part of it forward so my metrics look good... because all I need right now to look good is something in every box.
I'm also told that while my grandfather finished the crossword puzzle every day— he'd finish it all in one sitting, with a pen— his way of "finishing" it was not what you might think. If he didn't know the answer to a clue, he'd put in a guess. He didn't look things up in a crossword solvers' dictionary or ask his wife or older kids for help. And if the letters didn't line up, oh well. His definition of done was "a letter in every box". They didn't have to be the right letters; there just had to be something in every box.I was reminded of that "solution" today when I was updating my opportunities in Salesforce.com. I have a timeslot reserved on my calendar every Friday late afternoon for Salesforce care and feeding. I make sure all my records are up to date, with accurate brief notes about status. My boss regularly thanks me for being so on top of this, as the fields I update are columns in reports that sales leaders scrutinize. When a VP challenges him about an account I'm working on, he's got the answer right there, and the VP can see it, too.
So, how is this like my grandfather's "an answer in every box" nonsense? It's not... so far. The status details are genuinely important. I strive to keep them as accurate, as lucid, and as concisely written, as possible. Where I fret I'm adopting my grandfather's nonsense— writing "an answer in every box" even if the answer is hokey— is with another field my boss told me is also important now, a link to where detailed notes are kept. That's my sales organization's latest weaksauce solution for the problem that it's been years since we had a single, standard place for keeping customer notes.
Out of the ~50 opportunities with my name on them, half so were easy to enter links for. That's because I've been taking notes on them, in our old standard location. It's easy to copy the link into Salesforce... and the link leads to a real trove of data. I did those a few weeks ago.
The next quarter of the opportunities, there was a location for notes I could find but no real content there... or the latest notes were from years ago. In my second pass through the list I entered those links. The empty boxes in the column in the report were galling, and this filled them in.
Today the last 1/4 or so of the opportunities in my report were still missing values. I'd left these blank the longest because there is genuinely nothing I've been able to find for them. They're opportunities I've just inherited from someone else, or they've just been created— and with their creator not sharing notes anywhere.
Today I decided I would fill in that last 1/4 of the list. I spent time creating new pages in the old standard note system, the one that was the shared standard when I started at the company years ago but has been abandoned by almost everybody in favor of fractured standards or no standard at all.
I made the pages I created look pretty. In addition to populating each new page with the company name and URL, I pasted their logo and a one-sentence blurb about each company that I shameless stole from their homepages. There's no useful content on those pages, but they are pretty. Another report scrapes them for logo images and shows those... so, hey, it looks like real work!
Yes, it looks like real work, but is it just busywork? I was conflicted about that this afternoon. I decided finally that it both it's not busywork.
Sure, right now it's just metrics engineering. I'm doing just enough work to juice my metrics. There's no actual content behind them... yet. That's why it seems like busywork but also why it's actually not. At some point there will be content in all those pages. At some point I'll engage on each of those opportunities and document my work. Having created locations for it now means I won't have to create locations for it later. I am doing real work that I'd have to do later anyway. I'm just pulling part of it forward so my metrics look good... because all I need right now to look good is something in every box.
