Many of us have an almost allergic reaction to the word process. You may have fever dreams of compound boards and burned down charts. Maybe you've had to deal with the pain of going from one tool to another, totally changing your process or supposedly implementing a better one. And the outcome feeling like just more and slightly different work that confuses your team and confuses you. Sometimes it may feel like that process is only going to serve whoever cares about the process. And not the product that you're working on. Maybe it doesn't help your productivity or at least it doesn't seem to. In today's episode, though, I want to give you some hope or at least a different perspective on how you can view these different processes. At a different level, you may have something like a process for yourself. If you've never thought about a process in your life or creating consistent processes, that might also be due to some of that allergy that we were talking about earlier. But the truth is, processes are essentially plans. Perhaps dynamic plans. Plans where certain parts of that plan are repeated or are triggered by a specific state. Maybe they are a blueprint for how to do something over and over or how to do something when a particular event occurs. But ultimately, a plan is a type of process. Or I guess a process is a type of plan. And so whatever we're saying in today's episode applies to both plans and processes. Now imagine that you didn't have... You didn't have a plan for your work today. Some of you might say that that would be liberating. That in fact, you probably know what to do for the most part. And that having a strict plan isn't really necessary all that much. And despite the fact that maybe your process is actually generating that knowledge for you, that you know what's important because of some process. There is some validity to the idea that... On an average day, a plan or a process may not provide a significant amount of value. You might have seen this play out in stand-up. If you're not familiar with this, you probably will become familiar with it. Stand-up meetings tend to take about 10 to 15 minutes at the beginning of each day for a scrum team. Many of us have seen those rules broken pretty harshly. Stand-ups that take an hour or longer, even though they were supposed to only take 10 or 15 minutes. Stand-ups that veer off into completely uncharted territory that has nothing to do with the work at hand. Once again, breaking the rules of stand-up. But if you've seen process go wrong, you may have gone sour on it. They may have contributed to some of that allergy. But most of the time, process is just... Just kind of there. In other words, your stand-up, most of the time, doesn't go wrong. It just doesn't feel all that important. You bring your update to the table. Other people bring their updates to the table. You discuss what you're doing and then you move on. You might say, well, we would have just done our work anyway. If we didn't have stand-up, we'd have 10 to 15 minutes back in our day. And... We'd have a little more productivity. Maybe a little more flexibility in our mornings. And this criticism is founded on the basis that your stand-up is not valuable. But that is based on the average day. In other words, stand-up may, on average, not produce a huge amount of value. But... This is the takeaway for today's episode. Your process is not intended to just produce value on a standard day. Let me say this again. And we'll use different language. Your plan in your life. Your plan for your day or for your week, your month, for the next three years. Your plan is not intended to give you minute-by-minute guidance on an average day. Your plan is intended to be there when a critical moment occurs. Your process is there when a critical moment occurs. What is a critical moment? When something fails miserably. When you have a question that is hard to answer. When you have competing priorities or a hard decision to make. When you have to decide between two really good options. Or three. When you have to decide between two or three really bad options. Your plan of attack. Your process is there for those moments. The amount of value generated by a process in a critical moment greatly outpaces the amount of value that it produces in a standard moment. Understand something. The standard way that you operate is informed by your process. But the standard way you operate is also protected by your process in those critical moments. How this plays out is when you have those critical moments occurring, you don't use gut intuition to make decisions. You don't use some heuristic. You don't decide based on who the most important person in the room is. You don't decide based on authority or potential for a raise necessarily. You decide based on your process. If you have a plan in your life, this is how it plays out in a personal situation. If you have a plan in your life, you've committed to a plan and you've reviewed it. You know this is the way you want to go. If you have two good options, one furthers your plan and the other one doesn't. They may both look enticing. But choosing which one to say no to could be really difficult. Saying no to the wrong one might veer you off the course to your plan. The things that you validated that you really actually care about doing. So your process is not there to make each and every day drastically better. Hopefully your process does provide some value on a standard day. Hopefully it does help things run smoothly. But your process... Your process is really there to create a way forward in a critical moment. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. This idea about process being for critical moments. Being designed and put in place for critical moments in your career. Critical moments in your life. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. If you did, please join us in the Developer Tea Discord community. Head over to developertea.com slash discord to join today. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea. Thank you.