Quotes About Focus

Yes, I'm just a developer, so I try to find the simplest possible solutions. ... If you go to a bakery, the bakery isn't playing with five million different tools just because the old flour became too boring after a while. - Adam Bien

into Studio City with my eyes closed, trying not to think about

The moment our gazes met, the rest of the world washed away—

A man devoted time to what mattered to him—to what he deemed worthy of his attention.

Impending death makes one run faster. I think that's probably why they fire a gun before track meets.

When you come before the Lord, it is not necessary that you think upon the Lord. It is only necessary that you continue in your progress.

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.

Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it.

Remember, it goes beyond reducing WIP. Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.

During the meeting and the subsequent resolution, we should explicitly disallow the phrases "would have" or "could have," as they are counterfactual statements that result from our human tendency to create possible alternatives to events that have already occurred.

I say assertively, "Give me three lists. One that requires Brent work, one that increases Brent's throughput, and the last one is everything else. Identify the top projects on each list. Don't spend too much time ordering them—I don't want us spending days arguing. The most important list is the second one. We need to keep Brent's capacity up by reducing the amount of unplanned work that hits him.

any improvement not made at the constraint is just an illusion, yes?

We need to focus on the riskiest changes," I continue. "The 80/20 rule likely applies here: Twenty percent of the changes pose eighty percent of the risk.

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system. To do that, you need to know what matters to the achievement of the business objectives, whether it's projects, operations, strategy, compliance with laws and regulations, security, or whatever.

When you spend all your time firefighting, there's little time or energy left for planning.

The First Ideal—Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal—Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal—Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal—Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal—Customer Focus

Unlike the other categories of work, unplanned work is recovery work, which almost always takes you away from your goals. That's why it's so important to know where your unplanned work is coming from.

This fast and frequent feedback is such a big part of achieving the Second Ideal of Focus, Flow, and Joy. And all of this was enabled by properly elevating the improvement of daily work over daily work itself, as dictated by the Third Ideal.

achieving this greatness is never free. It requires focus and elevation of improvement of daily work, even over daily work itself. Without this ruthless focus, every simple system degrades over time, increasingly buried under a tundra of technical debt.

She wonders what is happening: Too many promises to the market? Bad engineering leadership? Bad product leadership? Too much technical debt? Not enough focus on architectures and platforms that enable developers to be productive?

The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy.

the Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus, where we ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers, as in, are they willing to pay us for it or is it only of value to our functional silo?

Erik then grows still and merely says, "To fix your problem, you need to do a lot more than just learning how to say no. That's the tip of the iceberg.

Stop starting. Start finishing.