By this point it should pretty apparent that in developing meaningful products there are a lot of different contexts of work flying around. Designing, creating tasks, working with stakeholders, giving demos, cartography, the list goes on and on. From this smorgasbord of contexts comes a question - how on earth do we organize all of this in time?
Carving Space for Excellence
Well, the very first observation we can make is that within each of these contexts we want people to be fully invested. Focus and investment is integral to getting the best out of our brains. I'm sure you've had the experience where someone will interrupt you in the middle of a flow state. They'll come along and want to start having a conversation about something they're concerned about and suddenly you can't focus on either them or your work. Distractions decimate our ability to be productive. Therefore, in order to do well amongst a wide variety of contexts we need to make sure we carve out and protect individual spaces for each of them. As soon as they start bleeding into one another we are going to lose focus and investment.
Relatedly, good work requires flow and flow takes time to really sink into. It takes a little while to get into a really good book, or to start feeling flow around coding, or to warm up your brain during a brainstorming session. This is the "context switching overhead" you'll often hear people talking about, and what it means for us is that regardless of how we end up organizing our time, we need to make sure each carved out space has enough time in it to both develop a state of flow and then take advantage of that state for a reasonable amount of time. So beyond carving out space we must also carve out enough space for flow.
Creating Common Utility
Many of these contexts involve whole groups of people. From demoing, to working with stakeholders, to developing maps of the space with your team, there's no lack of meetings that need to be scheduled. This obviously means that as we build out our organization of contexts we need to make sure it's a common organization strategy. Everyone needs to be considered.
While at first this may seem like a trivial observation, on closer look it is not. Especially in a world where we have multiple time zones, where people often work more than one project, and where work gets more and more complicated (thus requiring the input of more and more people) finding this common ground gets very tricky. Not only must we just find time where people are "free" but we've got to find free time that actually works well for people. If one group of people end up with a schedule that just doesn't have large blocks of time for flow driven development just because you need to fit them around folks in other time zones, you haven't achieved the goal of finding common utility. In coordinating between people it's not enough to just find times people can meet, you have to make sure that those meeting times also work well for allowing each of the individual parties involved to organize the rest of their time. In other words don't stomp on people simply because you need to organize a meeting - you must understand and be sensitive to their work flows. Common utility is of the utmost importance and surprisingly often overlooked.
Consistency for Trust and Practice
Our next set of observations will be familiar to anyone who's used practice to become good at something whether that be a sport, a musical instrument, or something else - and that is the importance of consistency.
The first point here is that consistency is required to create faith in your organization of time. You need to have a clear repeatable pattern if you're going to predict where you'll be several weeks or months from now. Remember you've got maps of the problem space to maintain, different MLPs to build, stakeholders to keep updated, ideas to incorporate, tasks to write... you get the idea. How are the folks involved going to have confidence all of these things will get accomplished in time? Only with a pattern can predictions be made and therefore only with a pattern can people have faith. As a result, creating that pattern is essential for allowing people to feel comfortable sinking their teeth into particular tasks without worrying about the whole picture at the same time. And patterns in time are cycles, consistent cadence creates trust.
The second point is that practice makes perfect but practice only works if you do it consistently. If you practice your instrument for a random amount of time and at random intervals you'll get nowhere. The human body and brain only trains itself when the training is consistent. Therefore if we hope to become better and better at what we do and get that instinctive talent that comes from practice, we're going to need to ensure that we're entering into each of these contexts repeatedly and consistently. Getting practice in our work is yet another reason to drive a consistent cadence. Without it, it'll be like trying to learn guitar by playing it every other month - something that just doesn't work.
Pace and Acknowledging Rest
Finally in all of this talk about work we must acknowledge something else - no one will remain productive if all they do is work. Whatever cadence we build must acknowledge the enormous value of rest and pace. There's a tendency in our culture to see people who work themselves to death as heroes. The long hours, the sleepless nights, are supposedly signs of their virtue. While there are times where this becomes necessary (although those times are almost always indicative of a poorly managed project), burnout should not be confused with productivity. As people burnout they find themselves becoming less and less productive per unit of time and therefore have to compensate with longer and longer hours which just contributes to the burnout. Eventually they just can't output the same amount of work they did under normal circumstances. It's akin to trying to run a marathon while sprinting. At first it'll look like you're winning but it certainly won't last for long. Selecting a good pace and acknowledging the value of rest is just as essential (if not more essential) to productivity as all of the other observations we've made thus far.
Building an Environment for Success
From all of this, a particular pattern should have become pretty clear. Cadence is built to ensure that we're creating the best environment to support the human mind. By carving out time we're allowing for investment and flow. By creating common utility we're making sure no one is stomped on. By developing a consistent pattern we're giving people the cadence they need to get real practice in (and thus be able to grow) while also creating enough trust in the outlay that they can go heads down on each of the individual pieces without having to worry about the whole. And by acknowledging rest and setting a healthy pace we're ensuring people can stay productive in the long term. Cadence is the means by which we give people the space and support they need to be their best and grow. So given its importance how to we go about building one?
Well with our observations in hand this is now quite easy (at least in principle). We've essentially outlined a series of questions:
What are the various contexts that exist in your work?
How can you carve out space for each?
How much time is required to reach and take advantage of a flow state in each?
Who all should be involved and what do their work schedules look like?
How do I find common utility amongst them all?
How must I balance the time between these contexts to ensure we reach our goals?
How can I organize the cadence to generate the consistency needed for practice?
Am I acknowledging the value of rest and intentionally creating space for it?
Am I clearly setting and keeping a pace that will optimize productivity in the long run?
By creating a consistent cadence that answers these questions, you'll have done most of the work to build out a cadence that supports great work and growth. The last piece is to recognize that, like anything else you build, you'll learn new things over time that will help you improve this cadence. Thus we must add a final question to the mix:
How will I leave time in the cadence to retrospect upon and improve the cadence itself?
The Heartbeat
In summary, cadence is the means by which we carve out time for excellence, allow people to grow through practice, and give them the faith to be able to compartmentalize and dig in. Cadence creates an environment of success. As a result, building this heartbeat, developing it as time goes on, and protecting it from the always present desire to just become reactive is of the utmost importance for both team and project health. So find your time keeper and give them the tools, space, and support to do this job well. Like cartography it is a necessary condition for great work.
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