Scott Porad

In my yard there are two beautiful, tall pine trees that drop what seem to be an infinite number of pine cones.  So, on Saturday I headed out with my 7-year-old son to rake them and, in the process, learned some things about web and software development.

The first thing to know is that we moved to this house last summer from a postage stamp sized yard in the city.  Until now my son didn’t have experience raking anything more than about 10 square feet of lawn.  As he got going with enthusiasm, he basically just was just moving the cones around, sloshing them to-and-fro.  It was clear that he needed a little coaching.

Lesson #1: The Master Pile

First, I explained to him that we needed to make one big pile…The Master Pile.  We would rake all the pine cones into this pile, then we’d pick up the pile and put it into the yard waste bin.  The point of this lesson was that we needed a plan as a foundation for our project.  The same thing goes for any web or software project—you need a plan, a roadmap, a guide.

This bit of guidance worked well because it directed his efforts in one direction, but there were still issues.  He was raking a little bit here, a little bit there, but it didn’t seem like anything was actually getting done.

Lesson #2: The Clean Area

After he mastered The Master Pile, I explained to pick one small section, no bigger than 3 or 4 feet square, and get that area completely raked until it was clean of pine cones.  That would be The Clean Area.

Once he did that, which only took a few moments, I asked if it felt good to see that there was one part of the yard complete.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Okay, well, now pick another few feet next to it and make it bigger.  Keep on trying to make your Clean Area bigger and bigger.”

The lesson here was that when working on a project, you need to feel progress through small successes.  Success feels good, so set yourself up to have lots of it, even if they’re small.  When you’re having success, you’ll be having fun and want to keep on going.  Success is a drug, it’s addictive, so organize your project to get the biggest high possible.

But, it was still a big job.  Just because we had a plan, and we were having little successes along the way, doesn’t mean that it didn’t feel overwhelming still.  There were easily over a thousand pine cones.  How would we ever get this job done?!

Lesson #3: Focus on Progress

Building on the notion that success begets success, I had to relieve the overwhelming burden of what seemed like endless raking.  To do this, I worked at framing the project in positive a positive way.

“Dad, we’re never going to finish this.  Look at how many are left!”

“Oh, sure we are.  Look at how big our Clean Area is.  Instead of thinking about how much raking we have left, focus instead on how big our Clean Area has become.  Don’t think about what’s left.  Think about making the Clean Area as big as possible and we’ll be done in no time.”

The lesson here is obvious: focus on your success and progress, instead of the mountain ahead.  In the software or web development world, this means actually keeping a list somewhere of all the things that have been accomplished.

This is, in fact, how we do it on my team: we have an entire wall devoted to listing out all the things we’ve achieved and it just keeps on getting bigger and bigger and bigger to the point where it now dwarfs the list of stuff that we need to do.

All that said, I had never planned on having our yard raking job turn into a learning experience this weekend, but it did which made the job even more fun.  As they say, “once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right”.