When is ‘done enough’?
I’m getting close to putting the finishing touches to the Manual of Me, the first ‘product’ from Leapers.co, a tool to help people help their teams to get the best version of them.
It’s been a couple of months in the making, and with the support of the Leapers community, along with plenty of research around other people’s User Manuals for People and feedback from our beta users, the platform is almost ready to go live for public use.
However, the more work I do on the project, the more ideas which crop up, and I’m finding it hard to draw a line, and just get it out there.
For instance, as I write the guides for each ‘statement’ within the manual, and create exercises to help people complete their own, I realise that the Manual of Me is simply the output of a huge amount of work by the individual. We aren’t building a tool to just help people store their content, but rather a process to help people reflect upon how they thrive at work.
And upon reflection, I think I went about this project wrong — starting with the ‘output’ rather than starting with the input. It’s an easy mistake to make — the output, the manual itself is a tangible thing. It has a title, and headings, and boxes, and the database structure is simple, the code to allow people to put text in boxes and save it is basic — there’s nothing special about that, and you could easily replace the labels on the boxes from ‘How do I do my best work’ to ‘What countries do I want to visit before I die’, and you’d have a bucketlist app. If you can simply relabel something, and it becomes something else, you haven’t built something valuable, you’ve built an overly complicated sheet of paper which lives in a browser.
The real value is in the exercises we’re creating, that help you reflect upon your most positive states, interactions and modes for work. Currently, there are about 25 exercises, more are being created every day as I work towards the launch. Small, simple ‘games’ or playful techniques to help you observe the ways in which you work. Perhaps its a diary, or card game. Perhaps its word play or simply drawing a picture. Every exercise helps you to try and observe and reflect upon something — not dissimilar to what was built in OneDayCurious, or what Justine is doing with MindfulStrategist.
The current version is upside-down. It starts with creating an output, rather than starting with encouraging the inputs. So, what to do? Scrap it and redesign it back to front? I’m pretty sure by the time I got to the end of that version, I’d have another epiphany and something else will crop up, that I could redesign the site all over again. It’s part of my MO, I’m not a great completer-finisher, but rather a constant excited bundle of new ideas.
So, I’m drawing a line for myself, and I’m going to ship Version 1 of the Manual of Me as it is, upside-down, with the intention of releasing version 2 after some more feedback from real people (not just the voices in my head), and after the first version is ‘done’. Or rather ‘done enough’.
Platforms like this are never ‘done’, there will always be something more you can do, some feedback you could integrate, some small or large tweak to how it works. But without actually getting something out there, for people to use, 99% ready but not being used is exactly the same as 0% ready and not being used. It isn’t being used, and what’s the point of creating something if it only ever lives in the shed of your mind or notebook?
Keep an eye out for the first version of the Leapers Manual of Me — ready for your feedback to help me push towards the next better version of done.
