I skipped my own process and it cost me a Monday...
I spent today building something the slow way, because I skipped the step I tell everyone else not to skip!
Here is what happened....
I had an idea for a workspace where I could see everything I have going on in one place.
(A good idea.)
So I built the room.
I did not write the plan first.
(I have a planning process I run everything through, and I went around it, because the idea felt obvious enough that planning it seemed like paperwork.) 😅
By earlier this afternoon I had a room that looked finished and...
Could not get anything done. 🤦♂️
It could hold ideas... but it could not move them.
I would answer a question inside it and the same question would be waiting for me an hour later, and I would sit there getting annoyed at a thing I built.
Here's the rub...
The annoyance was the useful part.
Frustration is not a mood when you are building something.
It is *data***.**
It means a thing you expected to work does not, and the sooner you treat it as information instead of a feeling...
The sooner you find out what is actually wrong.
So here is the part I want to hand to you...
(Because it is the whole lesson.)
When the machine is not doing what I want, my instinct used to be to argue with the machine.
Write a smarter prompt...
Explain it again... Only louder. 😳
That is like yelling at your car for going off road while your own hands are on the wheel!
The car did exactly what the wheel said...
I was steering and I did not notice I was steering.
What I actually did wrong was *tell it how to organize instead of telling it what I wanted***.**
I had a process that works.
I skipped it... Then spent a day paying for the skip.
The fix was not clever.
I went back to the process.
Plan first, in writing, with the steps in order, before anything gets built.
Boring. (And it works.)
If you take one thing from this...
When you are working with AI and the results are mush, check your own scaffolding before you blame the tool.
Nine times out of ten you skipped a step you know about.
That is good news, because your own steps are the part you can actually fix.
FYI.. We did manage to get a couple of things done so far for this week (both free):
Saturday School runs Saturday mornings, one hour, and the next three are booked.
We build something real from scratch, live, including the parts that go wrong.
Nothing to buy and nothing to install to watch.
And if you want to see the free LEAP pattern this is all built on, you can grab that here (or give the link to your favorite AI and ask it how LEAP can help you!).
github.com/tomi-mercer/leap-design-pattern
Thanks for being a part of AutomatedWith.tech!
— Mercer