# Chapter 311

Progress looks different depending on what you are measuring and looking at as progress. Yesterday looked like massive progress on our project because we were laying down long wide boards and over a four hour period it looks like we made unbelievable progress. But yesterday would not have been possible without the two previous days of tedious careful meticulous work and planning. There was very little showing and visible from these two previous days of work, even though we have lots of hours and effort involved. The look of progress on each of these three days looks very different. What is visible progress is very very different each day.

So the guy I am working with thinks we wasted our time in the careful setup of the highly visible progress that we made yesterday. But I am here to tell you that without those two days in careful painfully slow work, there would have never been a big showing yesterday. The reason that I am belaboring this rather obvious point is that we make this mistake all the time in other areas, especially knowledge workers.

I work in the idea world. There are almost never big showing days where we are laying down long wide planks marking huge visible progress on a project. If I am lucky and successful there may be two days like that in a YEAR! Most of the progress is incremental and non-visible to almost everyone. So the metrics you are using to decide if you made progress or not, are super critical and often super nuanced. Pay attention to your work, measure carefully, keep it moving forward, ignore the big visible pieces and don’t give them more value than they actually have.