#37 – Pick priorities & stay mission-aligned: How to avoid “bikeshedding” | Sam Corcos & Ben Grynol

How many times do you get clear about your priorities, and then get distracted and focus on something completely unimportant because it feels productive? The Levels team has a name for that. Levels Co-founder and CEO Sam Corcos sat down with Ben Grynol, Head of Growth, to talk about “bikeshedding,” how it happens in companies, and how companies can avoid it.

03:19 – The idea of shaving a yak

It’s an idea where it’s the sorts of projects where there’s never a point where you can say, “I’m done.”

The idea is that shaving a yak, by the time you’ve finished shaving it, the part where you started has now regrown its hair. So, it’s like a task that you never finish. You’re just yak-shaving. You’re constantly just working around this giant animal. It’s the sorts of projects where there’s never… It’s when scope continues to increase and the project, it just never ends. And it’s incredibly painful and frustrating. That’s yak-shaving. It’s a common term that’s used in programming. Bikeshedding is another one that’s pretty common.

06:41 – What is Bikeshedding?

Ben explains what is bikeshedding about and how it affects the productivity of people in a workplace.

Bikeshedding’s very much a way of avoiding deep work, but making one self feel productive. So if you’re doing a lot of these small tasks that require shallow thinking, like call a spade, a spade. You are deciding on the hue of the bike shed color, that is pretty shallow, as opposed to the mechanical inputs required to actually build this nuclear power plant. We’ll call it in the celebration of avoidance, a culture of avoidance, it’s really easy to feel good and for other people to start celebrating these things that feel good. Like, “Hey, man, you did such a great job choosing that hue of the bike shed.” And you forget, and everyone rallies around this. That can be… It’s not just a productivity and a company killer, but it can also be this rallying cry for working on the wrong things.

08:35 – The hard things are not hard, they’re just easy to avoid

You may convince yourself you’re doing something but in reality you haven’t done anything.

There’s a Buddhist saying, which is something like, the problem is not that the hard things are hard, it’s that there are often easy alternatives. I’m butchering the exact phrase. But the idea is that, it’s like when we know that there’s a particular project that we should be doing. We tend to procrastinate, because it’s way easier to just open up Twitter and distract yourself for a few hours. Like, “I could work on that really important strategy doc that’s due next week, or I could just do email for a little bit.” It’s really easy to get distracted by these easy alternatives and convince yourself that you’re making progress, because you’re doing something.

11:35 – The Eisenhower Matrix

Sam explains another useful framework on how to be productive.

Another useful framework is the Eisenhower Matrix, which is a common thing that people talk about when they think about prioritization. The Eisenhower Matrix, it is an X, Y plane. On one axis is importance, and on the other is urgency. Most people start from what is urgent. So the urgent-important is something that you have to do now. The problem is that most people spend almost all of their time in urgent not-important in that quadrant, because it’s really hard to say no to things that feel urgent. The important non-urgent is really where almost all of the value is. And it’s probably the most neglected quadrant for all startups.

13:27 – The Bike Shed effect

Be hyper-aware of the things that can distract you from the important tasks at hand.

The bike shed is like, really it’s not important and it’s not urgent. The answer on that matrix is, don’t do it. It’s not even don’t do it at all. It’s, avoid it at all costs. Be so aware, be hyper-aware of these things because you get… You shouldn’t do one of them, but what happens is, work this idea of “work,” that being in the knowledge work industry, which we all are, we end up doing 20 of these things, not-important, not-urgent.

15:47 – Get out of the weeds

Working day-to-day in the weeds of your tasks can dilute the bigger picture of what you’re creating. It’s important to step back regularly to re-evaluate how your work is solving the bigger problem.

When you’re in the weeds, it’s really easy to justify every specific decision. And it’s hard to be able to start saying no to things because of this greater context and prioritization. So, that’s one of the reasons why I really encourage people on our team to take time off, to do think weeks, to have some separation from the day-to-day. I found that I do a week off a quarter for my think weeks, and it’s really not… It’s typically not until the third, maybe even the fourth day of being away from the hyperactive hive mind that I’m able to really think new thoughts and be able to see the bigger picture. So I really do think there’s a different mindset that has to be there in order to see the bigger picture, move away from what seems really important in the moment.

31:16 – Focus your actions around your core values

Knowing your values and mission helps guide your decision-making to avoid bikeshedding.

One of our core values is around tolerance, which is we believe that having a diversity of thought is really important. And having people with different backgrounds and worldviews and ideas is a really important part of making a successful company. And we are mission-focused on solving the metabolic health crisis. And things that are outside of scope for us are not what we’re going to be spending our time thinking about. We’re not going to be changing the color of our logo during pride month. Not that we have anything against it, it’s just not related to our core focus. And it’s an easy opportunity to find ourselves bikeshedding the problems that we need to be solving. We should be solving on metabolic health, we should not be solving which types of events we’re going to have some celebration around. That’s outside of the scope of the problem we need to solve. So making sure that you know what your focus is and what mission you’re solving, and narrowly focusing on that and solving it with 100% of your focus is really important.

34:13 – Stay true to your mission

Metabolic health is a sufficiently large problem that demands the team’s full attention.

Metabolic health is a sufficiently large problem that it is worth people spending their time solving. And getting distracted by every other conceivable problem that the world has, it really limits one’s ability to solve the core problem that your company’s mission is all about. So it’s not to say that one or the other of these issues is more or less important. It’s that focus is what brings these things to fruition. So staying focused on what it is you seek to solve, especially if that mission really is important. The number of people who have underlying metabolic dysfunction, the number of people who will die because of metabolic dysfunction is really significant. I think it’s an important enough mission to warrant that degree of focus.

40:56 – Sunk costs are the currency of bikeshedding

Don’t use sunk costs as an excuse to keep bikeshedding. Cut your losses and refocus on core goals that will drive meaningful results.

That’s why the idea of steering things back quickly and maintaining that focus, simplicity and focus, really pairing things down. One of the things that is hardest to do in any organization at any size, but is likely one of the… If you were to list out a top 10, it’s in there, is probably in a top three list is the idea of sunk costs, and always paying attention to sunk costs and not ignoring them because it’s too easy to rationalize the time that’s invested in a project and be like, “Well, we do have…” Say it is that expensive, “We have 500 engineering hours into this thing, we have to keep going.” And it’s just like one more hour is not making it any better at that… I assume it’s like, everyone agrees that this thing is something we shouldn’t be working on. It’s like, just stop spending money or time or anything on that because you’ve recognized that you’ve invested a lot of time and you’re trying to rationalize that it is beneficial to spend more time on this. And it’s just like… Sunk costs are the currency of bikeshedding.

43:47 – The responsibility of leadership

There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with being a leader, and the ability to make sure that people are working on the things that matter is a huge part of it.

So if you let these things metastasize and grow into projects where people are committing parts of their lives, they’re trusting leadership to a percentage of their life to solve a problem. And if you don’t respect that and you just allow people to work on things that are not related to the mission. There really is the responsibility of leadership to make sure that people are working on the things that are impactful, not just keeping their hands busy.

Sam Corcos: (00:06) Marc Randolph, who is one of the co-founders of Netflix talks about how the early days of a company are really just all about triage. He says, “You want to do a 100 things, but you can only pick three. And it’s really hard to say no to those other 97 things.” When you’re a larger company, you have capacity to do a lot more things. But when you’re a small company, it’s about picking the three that are the right ones. And if you don’t, your company dies.

Ben Grynol: (00:39)

I’m Ben Grynol part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level. Bikeshedding, what exactly is it? Well, it’s a term that Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of Levels, uses often. It’s something that we’ve started referring to internally more often as we work on more projects, as we undertake certain initiatives. What exactly is it? Well’s the idea of avoiding certain things that are hard, avoiding working on meaningful projects and in lieu, starting to work on things or spend time on things that are less important. So where did this idea come from?

Ben Grynol: (01:33)

Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a British Naval historian, and Parkinson observed that there was a committee organized to approve plans for a nuclear power plant in a small town. And they ended up devoting a disproportionate amount of time to relatively unimportant details such as the materials or the color that would be used to build the bike shed. They spent more time discussing that than the actual plans for the nuclear power plant. So Sam and I sat down and we discussed this idea of bikeshedding, how it happens in companies and how people can think about avoiding it. It can come at a huge cost to companies. And it can cause many companies to fail if they get too wrapped up in this idea of working on the wrong things, discussing the wrong initiatives, or just pursuing way too much bikeshedding. Here’s the conversation with Sam.

Ben Grynol: (02:29)

Okay. So thought it would be good to get into this idea of bikeshedding. The first time it had ever come up was a conversation, I think you had notoriously brought it up, but it’s something that we refer to internally. And it’s important to keep in the back of minds when it comes to projects, when it comes to company building, when it comes to everything. So why don’t we go into what exactly is bikeshedding? Where did it come from and why should people always keep a lens on it within organizations?

Sam Corcos: (03:01)

It’s one of those terms that’s pretty common within engineering teams, that I was surprised to find is not as widely used. There’s another term that’s often used in engineering, yak-shaving. It’s another one that…

Ben Grynol: (03:16)

What is that [crosstalk 00:03:17]? Let’s hear that.

Sam Corcos: (03:19)

The idea is that shaving a yak, by the time you’ve finished shaving it, the part where you started has now regrown its hair. So, it’s like a task that you never finish. You’re just yak-shaving. You’re constantly just working around this giant animal. It’s the sorts of projects where there’s never… It’s when scope continues to increase and the project, it just never ends. And it’s incredibly painful and frustrating. That’s yak-shaving. It’s a common term that’s used in programming. Bikeshedding is another one that’s pretty common. The idea of bikeshedding is also known as the law of triviality. You can look it up on Wikipedia I’m sure. It came from what is potentially an apocryphal story, but somebody, I think it was an economist wanted to understand how decisions were made in local governments. Looked at a town that was building a nuclear power plant in their town, which is a pretty big decision.

Sam Corcos: (04:23)

He wanted to understand how these decisions get made. He was surprised to discover that the overwhelming majority of the conversation had to do with what color the bike shed should be. And how many bikes should it hold. Completely missing the point of like, should we build a nuclear power plant in our town or not? People will often fixate… When there’s a really hard problem, people will often fixate on something that’s small and understandable, that they feel like they have control over. Should we build a nuclear power plant in our town? There’s a lot of consequences to doing that. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s not. It’s hard to be the person to take responsibility of that. It’s a really uncomfortable thing, but like everyone has an opinion on, should it be blue or green or whatever the bike she should be. So the challenge is that, I think most startups in my experience ultimately die because they bike-shed themselves to death. They have these really big problems that they need to solve, and they know they need to solve them. But we could just do a rebrand instead.

Sam Corcos: (05:38)

Let’s do that, because we have control over that and it’ll look nice. The brand really need to facelift, so let’s do a rebrand. I know there are so many of these things that are just classic distractions. We need to redo our logo because our logo, it needs to be fresh. Small, incremental changes to features when… A common term would be turd polishing, where they focus all of their time just like making the thing that they already know is bad more useful. Even though they know that they need to just get rid of it and try something else. But it’s really hard to let go, because when you do the hard thing, you’re taking a risk. And people are really afraid of taking risks. So the focus ends up being really just narrowly scoped to whatever the smallest, incremental easy thing is. And avoiding the really hard problems, which is really what… It’s really the only thing that people should be focused on, is solving the hard problems.

Ben Grynol: (06:41)

Bikeshedding’s very much a way of avoiding deep work, but making one self feel productive. So if you’re doing a lot of these small tasks that require shallow thinking, like call a spade, a spade. You are deciding on the hue of the bike shed color, that is pretty shallow, as opposed to the mechanical inputs required to actually build this nuclear power plant. We’ll call it in the celebration of avoidance, a culture of avoidance, it’s really easy to feel good and for other people to start celebrating these things that feel good. Like, “Hey, man, you did such a great job choosing that hue of the bike shed.” And you forget, and everyone rallies around this. That can be… It’s not just a productivity and a company killer, but it can also be this rallying cry for working on the wrong things.

Ben Grynol: (07:34)

So avoiding these hard tasks in favor of the easier, comfortable ones, it’s also analogous to the idea of avoiding difficult conversations of facing things head on. And things just get worse over time. We know because of group norms, if everybody’s really into the idea of the bike shed or the feature, or it doesn’t matter what’s being built, but everyone really gets behind the rebrand. There’s nine people, and the one person is afraid because there are group norms to have that difficult conversation. And to say like, “Hey everyone, I don’t know if we should talk about the color of the bike shed anymore.” Then you stand out as the outcast, like, “Hey, man, why aren’t you coming along for the ride?” So you can… It’s easy to fall into that trap. So the important thing is to be aware, as a team, of pulling everyone out of the weeds when this kind of thing starts to happen.

Sam Corcos: (08:35)

There’s a Buddhist saying, which is something like, the problem is not that the hard things are hard, it’s that there are often easy alternatives. I’m butchering the exact phrase. But the idea is that, it’s like when we know that there’s a particular project that we should be doing. We tend procrastinate, because it’s way easier to just open up Twitter and distract yourself for a few hours. Like, “I could work on that really important strategy doc that’s due next week, or I could just do email for a little bit.” It’s really easy to get distracted by these easy alternatives and convince yourself that you’re making progress, because you’re doing something. [Mills 00:09:20] talks about there’s that essay on LARPing your job, which is how a lot of people live their jobs and slack, is they make sure that the green online thing is always there.

Sam Corcos: (09:34)

And they randomly will contribute to channels here and there. And they’re just taking in these fire hoses of information, but they’re not actually working. They’re just doing all of the actions of working. I don’t think… I think most people don’t intend to do that and don’t want to do that. The problem is that some of these tools and processes make it really hard to do good work. That’s one of the reasons why we’re so focused on this deep work culture and asynchronicity, is that, most people in my experience really want to do high quality, good work. But they have just a really hard time with the way that the tools and the processes are set up to just be able to do it.

Ben Grynol: (10:19)

It can be such a slippery slope, because you end up doing this busy work. And it takes a while, but before you know it, you don’t really realize it, but you’re not actually solving this problem that you set out to solve. The mission of whatever company you’re a part of or whatever project you’re working on, you’re trying to solve… That’s what people do, they solve problems. And they make decisions all day. But making the shallow decisions feels really good and it feels busy and it feels productive. But when being honest with oneself, if you look in the mirror and you say, “Am I contributing to solving the problem?”

Ben Grynol: (10:57)

It’s like, not really. And you have to be aware that this happens and it happens over time. It’s slowly, “Oh, I’m just going to email now. Oh, I’m just going to do this.” And next thing you know, you’re like, “Oh, what I actually do is seven hours of this shallow work a day.” And it goes on for weeks on end. And you’re like, “What meaningful thing did I ship?” It’s not about it being perfect, it’s actually about it being janky, because like you said, it’s really easy to start polishing turd. That’s what you do. And that’s not moving things forward to solve a problem.

Sam Corcos: (11:35)

Another useful framework is the Eisenhower Matrix, which is a common thing that people talk about when they think about prioritization. The Eisenhower Matrix, it is an X, Y plane. On one axis is importance, and on the other is urgency. Most people start from what is urgent. So the urgent-important is something that you have to do now. The problem is that most people spend almost all of their time in urgent not-important in that quadrant, because it’s really hard to say no to things that feel urgent. The important non-urgent is really where almost all of the value is. And it’s probably the most neglected quadrant for all startups. Really people should be starting with, is it important? If it is not important, don’t do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s urgent, you just have to let it go and only work on important things.

Ben Grynol: (12:45)

The worst case, and this is what happens all too often is, the not-important, not-urgent. That’s like back to the beginning of the whole discussion. The bike shed is like, really it’s not important and it’s not urgent. The answer on that matrix is, don’t do it. It’s not even don’t do it at all. It’s, avoid it at all cost. Be so aware, be hyper-aware of these things because you get… You shouldn’t do one of them, but what happens is, work this idea of “work,” that being in the knowledge work industry, which we all are, we end up doing 20 of these things, not-important, not-urgent. And I’m speaking colloquially about it and generalizing, but that’s what ends up happening. Where the hour and a half conversation or the Slack thread about where to eat lunch next week is what happens. It’s really unfortunate, but that’s how our productivity gets killed. And you go, “Why haven’t we worked on that memo?” And it’s like, “Oh, I’ve been so busy.” And what you were deciding between was eating the pizza or the burger, something random like that. And that’s just, don’t waste time on that stuff.

Sam Corcos: (14:00)

And it’s easy to fall into that trap as well. I’ve been there many times. I think that… I was responsible for engineering and product at my last company, CarDash. I think the company ultimately died because I was not paying attention and I allowed product to bike-shed ourselves to death. I vividly remember a meeting, it was a product meeting in September where we were talking about and celebrating what we had delivered for the previous three quarters. And we were planning out what we were going to do for the next quarter. For the first time it was in this meeting when I realized that the version of the product that we had pitched for YCombinator was a very particular way of taking a picture of your license plate, showing you what repairs you need, having somebody pick up your car.

Sam Corcos: (15:00)

Service it same day, bring it back to you. Really convenient, really transparent. And yet nine months later, we had pretty much only done internal tools, making our operations more efficient. And every one of those incremental steps was easily justifiable along the way. But how did we get that far along without building the core product that we had sought out to build? And it’s because we kept thinking about incremental, marginal improvements in operational efficiency. And we allowed ourselves to get distracted from building the core product and finding product market fit. That was largely my own failure to be able to see the forest for the trees.

Sam Corcos: (15:47)

Because when you’re in the weeds, it’s really easy to justify every specific decision. And it’s hard to be able to start saying no to things because of this greater context and prioritization. So, that’s one of the reasons why I really encourage people on our team to take time off, to do think weeks, to have some separation from the day-to-day. I found that I do a week off a quarter for my think weeks, and it’s really not… It’s typically not until the third, maybe even the fourth day of being away from the hyperactive hive mind that I’m able to really think new thoughts and be able to see the bigger picture. So I really do think there’s a different mindset that has to be there in order to see the bigger picture, move away from what seems really important in the moment.

Ben Grynol: (16:43)

When was it at CarDash… Did you recognize when it was happening or was it reflecting on it afterwards where you’re like, “Man, that’s what happened?” Were you aware of it when it was happening? What did that look like?

Sam Corcos: (16:59)

I was aware of it after it was too late. I recognized it more specifically after the company was acquired, but in the moment when we were in that product meeting, I knew that something was wrong. Because I recognized that almost all of our resourcing in both design and engineering was going towards improving operational efficiency of a product that still hadn’t reached product market fit. And it was because each incremental decision made sense and it was achievable as well. Doing the hard thing seemed like something to do off in the distant future, but we could solve this very narrowly-defined project that was right in front of us. And it was like, “We can definitely hit a single here.” And when you would get it delivered, it would feel really good. The numbers would get better. But it totally missed the point of building a startup. If you’re not finding product market fit, you’re doing the wrong thing. That should be the only thing that you spend your time thinking about.

Ben Grynol: (18:07)

When you looked at that after, what was it that you told yourself? Or, how did you start thinking about it where you’re like, “Never again”? I love using that word because Mike D. he always uses never again, but it’s like, you have a revelation. We hear it all the time with members where they’ll have… They eat something, they see data and they’re like, never again. So they have tools in their toolkit of understanding the downsides to doing certain things. So bring it back to this idea of bikeshedding, what is it that you do now to recognize when it’s happening or to avoid it or to communicate it, to spread the gospel about it? Because it really is an important thing, and not to stretch it too far, but it really will kill companies. It does all the time.

Sam Corcos: (18:59)

I think the answer is, I try to make sure that I have some to reflect and to separate myself from the day-to-day going on at the company. When I’m deeply involved in day-to-day operations, I almost always miss these things and I catch onto them months later than I should. I think that… I was talking to one of the founders that I advised recently, and he has not yet found product market fit. And he really needs to focus on that. But there’s this one-off project that he can do, that’ll get him a press piece. And getting press feels good. So he is spending almost all of his time creating this story, creating a slide deck, creating a pitch for this one press hit. And it’s like, “Okay, you have less than a year of runway.”

Sam Corcos: (20:00)

“You have not found product market fit. What are you doing?” He’s like, “Yeah, but if we do this press thing, it’s going to change everything.” No, it’s not. You need to figure out who your customers are. You need to build a product for those customers. He can’t see it, because he’s so attached to what he’s doing now. And it feels easy. He’s going to be able to get that press hit, so he feels like he can win this and it’s going to look like something that’s an accomplishment. Whereas trying something new, getting rejected constantly by your customers, it’s not a good feeling. And it’s hard and it’s ambiguous. So most people shy away from it. Same thing as you mentioned around difficult conversations. It’s much easier to just avoid them than it is to accept that it’s going to be uncomfortable, and you have to push through it.

Ben Grynol: (20:54)

When you… By the way, it sounds like he’s not just choosing the color of the bike shed, he is now painting it, which is… That is the worst case scenario. Then you’re deeply invested. But what is it that you do to have the conversations? They can be really hard, because… Hypothetically we spend so much time as a team thinking about feedback, communicating feedback, creating content about how we give or receive feedback. But how do you say, “Hey, Ben, that’s bikeshedding”? It might be easy… So hypothetically there’s somebody that you’re very close with, and you can say to Josh… Because Josh, you’ve worked with historically for the longest at the company. And you’d be like, “Josh, I don’t know, that really feels like bikeshedding.” And somebody newer comes on the team and maybe they’re early in their career. They’re a year in and you don’t want to be… You don’t want to say something discouraging, but helping them to realize, this is an example of bikeshedding.

Ben Grynol: (21:57)

So how do you think about approaching these conversations? When it’s easy to recognize when it’s happening and sometimes you can bite your tongue because you go, “Let’s let this one resolve.” And when you do that, it’s not about avoiding the difficult conversation. It’s like, you don’t want to get too far ahead of your skis and be like bikeshedding. You start doing that and it’s just like, “Man, what are you doing? We’re actually trying to figure something meaningful out.” It really is an area where EQ has to be high, sensitivity towards what is and isn’t bikeshedding and giving people enough runway and autonomy to go and do their jobs well. What is it that you do so that you can call it out when you see it? Because sometimes you bite your tongue. You’re like, “Let’s let this resolve.” And three weeks goes by and you’re like, “That is expensive. That is a lot of bikeshedding.” So, what is it that you do when you see these things and you go, “Should I say something? Should I like…” What’s your mental model for it?

Sam Corcos: (22:58)

These are conversations that I’ve had with a lot of people on the team at different points in time. I’ve had this conversation with Miz who runs operations at some point in the past, where I really needed him to focus on some really high value things. But because he’s really good at building support teams, he just kept focusing on that because he knew that he could win. It took a lot of back and forth and working on it to get him comfortable with trying the next thing, because it’s ambiguous and scary when you don’t know if you’re going to be successful. And he knew that he could be 100% successful at building out the support function and building it something really excellent. But he didn’t know if you would be successful at the next thing that he tried.

Sam Corcos: (23:48)

So it took some working with him of like, “Miz, you’re bikeshedding this. You are so fixated on solving the support problem that you’re missing these important things that need to be done, that somebody needs to do.” I’ve had similar conversations with Alan, our head of design, where there are some big, meaty projects and concepts that need to be worked on. And he’s really among the best people in the world at thinking through behavior change and these types of interfaces, and solving these kinds of problems. But he can get pulled into solving smaller problems that unblock and engineer tomorrow, but don’t bring us to that next level. With him, what I insisted on was that he do a think week. I insisted that he break himself away from threads and the day-to-day communication, and just really focus on putting down some of his thoughts. It was incredibly productive.

Sam Corcos: (24:51)

Just for him having that space to not have to respond to people, gave him a ton of mental bandwidth to be able to think more deeply about the kinds of problems that we want to solve. So, I think that it’s depending on the person. Elena also mentioned this about how her ability to step away from the day-to-day communication really made a big difference in her ability to think about the data science problems that we need to think through. So, I think that has certainly been my experience, is having that separation. Sometimes it’s also getting external perspectives, is really helpful. So having people who have scaled organizations before. Some of the people that I talk to are other CEOs of companies that are larger than ours or people who have been CEOs multiple times and have much more experience than I do. And asking them about what I’m spending my time on and if it’s the highest value and the most important things that I could be doing. That’s a really helpful perspective.

Sam Corcos: (25:53)

People who have been there, who… Say like, some of the things that has been helpful for me is oftentimes when I find myself solving specific problems and I’m talking to other CEOs who give advice on these things. They’ll say, “You need to hire somebody for this. You’re bikeshedding. You are doing this because you know that you’re good at it and you can do it.” And hiring is really uncomfortable and coming up with a job description and handing it off. Something that you care about, handing it off to somebody else feels really scary, but that’s what you have to do. So getting that kind of perspective and realizing like, “Okay, I hear what you’re saying. I need to focus on what’s important right now, not what feels urgent in the moment.”

Ben Grynol: (26:40)

That’s the only way of scaling your time and scaling a company is by identifying these areas and being able to get the wheel going and hand it off as quickly as you can to people to actually take on those projects or take on those roles. But where it gets hard too is the idea of the emperors clothes, where you never want people to not tell you. If somebody feels you’re bikeshedding, you want to open up that conversation to be like, “Tell me when I’m bikeshedding.” Because hypothetically it might be harder to always identify. And even if you’ve got your spidy senses up and you’re like, “I will pull myself out of any bikeshedding that takes place.” But sometimes having the reinforcement where someone says to you, “Hey, this might be bikeshedding a bit.”

Ben Grynol: (27:30)

Then you can reflect on it for that 30 seconds, because the reality is we can’t take a think week 52 weeks of a year. So you’re not… It’s really easy to get caught up in the minutia of calms and moving fast and all these things. So you need somebody to just be like, hey, tap on the shoulder, “This feels like a bit of bikeshedding.” You reflect for 30 seconds, you’re like, “You’re right. What am I doing?” And it stops before it gets really bad. So why don’t we go through some of the things that people can do or some of the ways people can think about when it comes up, finding some resolution in all of it. Some of the key points, got a few written down here, but the idea of focusing on the issue or the problem that is being solved and always keeping that in the back of your mind where…

Ben Grynol: (28:20)

Josh does a great job every week of saying Levels shows you how food affects your health. If you’re not working on helping people understand how food affects their health, then throw up the flag and say, “Hey, I need to reprioritize.” That’s one way, is having everybody mission aligned and problem aligned. But being able to ask yourself, because only you can do that is say, “Are the things that I’m doing in this minute, in this hour, in this day, contributing to the problem that we need to solve.” And if the answer is no, you really need to check whether or not that’s the right area where time should be spent. One of the byproducts of that is not just doing it from an individual perspective and vetting your own work that you’re doing.

Ben Grynol: (29:05)

But having everyone be able to keep each other accountable, where creating this culture, we call it short toes in a way, but we’ll call it… The derivative of short toes is being able to call out bikeshedding. So short toes has many branches to it, but one of them is the idea of being able to have honest conversations and say, “I feel…” Maz did it the other day where we were all talking about something. He said, “Hey everyone, this feels a little bit like bikeshedding.” And it’s like, “A 100%, you’re totally correct.” And that is the right answer. So everyone goes, “Cool. Let’s wrap up this communication in this thread because we’re all just lobbing things into the abyss with no real forward movement on it.”

Sam Corcos: (29:53)

A lot of conversations end up in these high entropy bike-shed moments where the conversation will just eventually devolve into something really trivial that everyone can have an opinion on. So the conversation just gets to that level where everyone’s arguing about something very small. We’ve done a pretty good job of this. One area that people can get stuck on is oftentimes things that involve something that’s current events related or something that’s political. So making sure that you have good alignment and you’re able to come to a resolution quickly, have it written down as something that you don’t need to readdress. We have a really good memo on this, on how we handle gender pronouns in our forms. That is something where many companies will spend tens or hundreds or thousands of hours of people’s time arguing over people’s opinions on these things. Or you come up with a resolution, you figure out the intent of why you’re doing this to begin with. And then you come to a decision. Then you don’t revisit it constantly. There are so many areas where you can easily get distracted in some completely unrelated problem.

Sam Corcos: (31:14)

I’ve seen this in a lot of companies as well, where… One of our core values is around tolerance, which is we believe that having a diversity of thought is really important. And having people with different backgrounds and worldviews and ideas is a really important part of making a successful company. And we are mission-focused on solving the metabolic health crisis. And things that are outside of scope for us are not what we’re going to be spending our time thinking about. We’re not going to be changing the color of our logo during pride month. Not that we have anything against it, it’s just not related to our core focus. And it’s an easy opportunity to find ourselves bikeshedding the problems that we need to be solving. We should be solving on metabolic health, we should not be solving which types of events we’re going to have some celebration around. That’s outside of the scope of the problem we need to solve. So making sure that you know what your focus is and what mission you’re solving, and narrowly focusing on that and solving it with 100% of your focus is really important.

Ben Grynol: (32:24)

Brian Armstrong went through that with Coinbase, where eventually there were a lot of things that were happening from a societal perspective and a political perspective. And things that are important, they’re very important, but they’re not important to that company’s mission. So Coinbase said, Brian Armstrong sent out a memo and said, “If these are things that are important to you, we support it, we support you. But Coinbase does not support it because that is not aligned with our mission. So we are not going to spend time, and if this is not the right place for you, that is entirely fine. We support that. But let’s all be honest with ourselves that this is not what we’re going to spend our time on.” And it rub some people the wrong way, and rightfully so.

Ben Grynol: (33:09)

But then it becomes, like you always allude to, it becomes a matching problem where it’s just like, if you want that, then you have to find an organization that wants to talk about these things and wants to… Let’s also still-man it a bit. You need to have both sides of it. You need to have advocates in the world, you need to have people that are protesting and fighting. But when you are in startup mode and startup phase, and every minute that you’re not spending on solving the problem you set out to solve, it just takes away… It erodes your time so much that it gets to the point where people, sometimes they’ll look back and they’ll be like, “I’m not really sure how we failed.” And it’s like, well, it’s just like investing. It’s all compound returns. It’s like bikeshedding compounds exponentially. It compounds over time, over and over, and the next thing you know, you’re at three months of runway and you’re like, “What happened?” Default dead.

Sam Corcos: (34:13)

Metabolic health is a sufficiently large problem that it is worth people spending their time solving. And getting distracted by every other conceivable problem that the world has, it really limits one’s ability to solve the core problem that your company’s mission is all about. So it’s not to say that one or the other of these issues is more or less important. It’s that focus is what brings these things to fruition. So staying focused on what it is you seek to solve, especially if that mission really is important. The number of people who have underlying metabolic dysfunction, the number of people who will die because of metabolic dysfunction is really significant. I think it’s an important enough mission to warrant that degree of focus.

Ben Grynol: (35:05)

That’s exactly it. Some of that comes down to the idea of strategies, if we’re offering tactics. How can you avoid these things? So timeboxing projects or initiatives is a great way, where it’s really easy for people to be honest in a group, whether it’s with tasks or decisions to make. But if it’s like, the nuclear power plant needs to be done tomorrow or three days from now, everyone’s… The second something happens, and that’s why it’s called like Parkinson’s law of triviality because Parkinson’s law, it’s going to take as long as you give it time for. So if that is a 10-year horizon, it’s like really easy to fall into these traps. If it’s three days, people are like, “We do not have time, we have to get…”

Ben Grynol: (35:53)

You see this with direct-to-consumer companies when they’re really small and starting out, where they’re like, “We have to get these boxes out the door, these are orders. We literally need to wrap these and get them in the mail, there’s no time to do anything else.” So when you timebox projects or initiatives or tasks with decisions to be made, it’s easier to avoid that. Whether it is a small feature, whether it’s a project, but saying, “Hey, here are our goal posts,” that’s one tactic. Another is the idea of steering projects back early, as opposed to letting them go on and on. Because our time’s just so expensive that really that is Parkinson’s law. If you allow a memo… We value memos deeply, but there’s a point… And we don’t have… Maybe you’ve got better insight around this, but a memo that takes full time, it took two solid weeks.

Ben Grynol: (36:48)

There is a point of diminishing returns, that thing isn’t getting better with two months of work. It is getting incrementally better. It’s probably… And if we pull it back, it’s probably after six days of work, like after some amount of time, it’s probably only getting incrementally better. So then how far back can you pull it where it’s like, “Can you do this thing in two or three days to get the initial thoughts out there?” Because the initial thoughts are the foundation for the thinking and the discussion to happen. It’s not like… That’s back to, “Well, we can’t ship this thing because it’s not perfect.” Well, you can do that for four years. No, it’s in draft mode.

Sam Corcos: (37:30)

I might challenge that on memos specifically only because it’s highly dependent on the type of memo and-

Ben Grynol: (37:37)

Yes, agree.

Sam Corcos: (37:38)

… the level of experience that the person has. There’s definitely risk of bikeshedding when it comes to memos in terms of perfectionism and wanting to have all of the answers, instead of delivering something and being able to add to it. I think for a lot of things, it’s almost always worth putting in the extra time to really make sure you know the answer. Because a lot of these decisions, especially with our strategy memos, they have significant downstream costs. So a strategy document that determines our path for a clinical product, the outcome of that memo could end up determining something like 400 [inaudible 00:38:23] weeks. If we make the wrong decision, spending an extra like four weeks of time up front could save us a tremendous amount of pain down the road in terms of how we allocate resourcing.

Sam Corcos: (38:35)

When I think about tactics for avoiding bikeshedding, the thing that really comes to mind for me is… Another founder, friend of mine was saying that he… He’s a CEO and he says he feels like his job is the chief reminding officer. And that’s just all day, every day at all of his meetings. He says, “Once they hit a certain scale,” I don’t remember what scale it was. But he said that he was now in the influence business as opposed to the execution business. So he spends almost all of his time just reminding people what the goals are. And things were constantly… I was talking to another product leader this morning and he was saying how a lot of projects, They’re like a Ouija board where you start here and you know what’s in front of you, but somehow the spirits keep taking you to the left and to the right.

Sam Corcos: (39:28)

You as leading the product org or whatever set of problems you have. It’s like trying to steer that Ouija board back to the center, towards that end state that you want to get it to when the evil spirits are trying to pull it in one direction or the other. I really resonated with that analogy, because it feels that way quite often, where you get total alignment from a memo or from a discussion. Like, great, we all know what we need to do. And then a few weeks go by and then you start to look at what’s being worked on. And those people, it’s not like their opinions have changed, but somehow new justifications and new things that felt urgent made it onto the roadmap. And you’re not quite sure how, and then you just let it go.

Sam Corcos: (40:15)

And then the next thing you know, you’re three months behind and you don’t know how you got there because you thought that you had agreement. It’s just a really hard problem of just staying focused on the problems that need to be solved. Marc Randolph, who is one of the co-founders of Netflix talks about how the early days of a company are really just all about triage. He says, “You want to do a 100 things, but you can only pick three. And it’s really hard to say no to those other 97 things.” When you’re a larger company, you have capacity to do a lot more things. But when you’re a small company, it’s about picking the three that are the right ones. And if you don’t, your company dies.

Ben Grynol: (40:56)

That’s why the idea of steering things back quickly and maintaining that focus, simplicity and focus, really pairing things down. One of the things that is hardest to do in any organization at any size, but is likely one of the… If you were to list out a top 10, it’s in there, is probably in a top three list is the idea of sunk costs, and always paying attention to sunk costs and not ignoring them. Because it’s too easy to rationalize the time that’s invested in a project and be like, “Well, we do have…” Say it is that expensive, “We have 500 engineering hours into this thing, we have to keep going.” And it’s just like one more hour is not making it any better at that… I assume it’s like, everyone agrees that this thing is something we shouldn’t be working on. It’s like, just stop spending money or time or anything on that because you’ve recognized that you’ve invested a lot of time and you’re trying to rationalize that it is beneficial to spend more time on this. And it’s just like… Sunk costs are the currency of bikeshedding.

Sam Corcos: (42:07)

The sunk cost fallacy is… We could do a whole nother episode on that. It’s another one that I have seen really kill companies. And it’s definitely a parallel to bikeshedding in as much as, when projects start to go off track, if they’re not solved… If you don’t bring it back on track very quickly, it can be an incredible morale drain. Actually, I have a friend who was an engineer at about a 300 person company at the time. They decided they wanted to build some custom piece of software that really didn’t need to be built, but they were convinced they had to build a custom solution for a thing that’s much more commonly used as an off-the-shelf tool. They took him, he’s an excellent engineer, and they took a couple of their other best engineers to work on this for like a year.

Sam Corcos: (43:07)

It became pretty obvious to anyone paying attention, that about three months in, it was not a good idea. But they felt like if they pulled them off now, it would be too much of a morale hit to those people because they just spent three months working on something. So they thought, well, it’s almost done. Another year goes by and they still haven’t delivered it. And when they finally deliver it, they end up just not even using it because the off-the-shelf solution was better. And then of course, all of those engineers quit because it was such a crushing situation of wasting a year of your life on something that never saw the light of day. So if you let these things metastasize and grow into projects where people are committing parts of their lives, they’re trusting leadership to a percentage of their life to solve a problem. And if you don’t respect that and you just allow people to work on things that are not related to the mission. There really is the responsibility of leadership to make sure that people are working on the things that are impactful, not just keeping their hands busy.