Spec your work

TJL #91

Feb 24, 2021

The image above is a todo list (also called a spec) that I made. I am currently working on a small toy project in react-native and would love to ship it to the app store.

At first I was scared of doing this. There are so many ways it can fail. I’ll be honest here and say that I’m still scared. But thinking about it, writing about it, and making lists, makes it less scary and more approachable.

Creating a plan of attack makes it real, tangible, and doable. “Shipping an app to the app store,” is bold, audacious, and scary. Ticking items off a well-defined todo list is not.

All I want to tell you is this: spec your work whenever possible. Write it down. Scope it. Whatever you want to name it, hammer it down, nail it down. Spec. Your. Work.

Benefits of speccing your work

Speccing your work has 3 major benefits:

Externalisation: It takes your thinking and puts it somewhere outside of your brain. This is usually paper or some other digital format. We have huge blind spots when we talk to ourselves (our biases) and by externalising your todo list you are able to look at it more objectively.
Strong scope: By speccing your work you automatically create scope. And a strong one at that. Everything that is on the list is in the scope. Anything that is outside of the list is out of scope. You will notice that as you start working on the list you might cut even more things. That’s fine. Just make sure that you have the scope hammered down so that you can say to yourself: “I’m done. This is it.”
Visible/tangible: By speccing your work you make it visible and you make it tangible. When you keep a project in your head it is easy to get overwhelmed because there are more than 4 moving pieces. Everything is moving and things are scary and big and ugh. Once you start writing it down you can isolate pieces and pick them off one by one. This is huge for your motivation and it serves as a reminder of the effort you have already put in and things you’ve already have accomplished.

Don’t take my word for it. Take Roam Research CEO/founder Conor White-Sullivan’s word for it!

Previous writings on this topic

It turns out that I have written extensively about this topic already

In TJL #31: Work with an outline (Daily productivity #6) I urge myself to work with an outline. This is a tip that does wonders for me. I don’t think I have ADHD but I thought this meme was funny.

Replace ADHD with INTP and you got us : INTP

In TJL #30: Start with writing your README (Daily productivity #5) I say the same thing, but this time for programming. Think through what you want to build end-to-end. Think of it as an interface and abstract away all the data and nitty gritty details. Just tell someone what buttons to press and what results to expect.

In TJL #85: The View From Above I quote Marcus Aurelius who, in turn, quotes Plato. He urges us to sometimes step back and take the view from above and see what a beautiful chaotic mess of human beings we are: “If you want to talk about people, you need to look down on the earth from above. Herds, armies, farms; weddings, divorces, births, deaths (…) … all mixed together, a harmony of opposites.”

What these three TJLs have in common is that they urge you to take a different perspective. Start from the highest level of abstraction possible and work from there: start with an outline, start with a readme, or take the view from above.

Conclusion

If you are stuck, try writing down what you want to do. In other words, spec your work.

Previous TJLs

Read my previous TJLs by following on the links down below:

Today Jan Learned

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