Iterations : The Anxiety Drug.
We fear the future and neglect the present. That creates a level of anxiety that partially paralyzes our thought process when it is most needed. Our brains can process one thought at a time. Not more. Multi-tasking is an illusion. What we are actually doing is breaking up thoughts into pieces and swapping them for other thought pieces floating in our minds. Until eventually, and with some luck, one thought is fully processed.
This lack of focus and not being able to concretely finalize a thought process in one chunk contributes to that fear of the future. Because we can’t rationalize on time what needs to be done.
Working and, why not living, by iterations can help us focus on what's next. Iterations are time bound. Meaning, we are going to focus our resources for a fixed period of time. In the case of a thought, our main resource is our brain. But if we are talking about agile projects, our resources could be our engineering team and/or QA team, to name a couple. We may be trying to deliver a product, service or a POC — Proof of Concept. Just like with a thought, changing focus along the iteration creates anxiety everywhere.
The team will produce its best results when they are in the zone. Constantly updating the task at hand only adds noise and reduces our chances of delivering a high quality product, service or POC.
Just think of this everyday example: the weekend is starting and you have 2 “full” days to do all the things you relegated over the week. Laundry, cooking, hair cut, grocery shopping, watching a movie, you name it. The weekend starts and you suddenly find yourself cooking at the same time that you are waiting for the washing machine to finish first batch of dirty clothes and you also have movie paused on the tv. You are “multi-tasking”, but are you really focused on each activity? There is a high chance some part of your cooking batch will be messed up or you’ll let your washing machine stay idle for longer than necessary until you load the second batch. You can’t be everywhere at the same time.
Iterations help us break with this illusion. Just focus on one thing at a time. Start small and then, for lack of a better word, iterate! Time and other resources are limited. After your first iteration, a result will be visible. The result will not necessary be final, but showing the value in progress make us feel at ease. And thus, decreases our anxiety about the future because we can see what today we generated a tangible result.
