A surprising amount of our time is spent sorting things to create value.
They sort the rotten cranberries from the good ones to ensure that the bag at the market is worth buying. And we sort the movies worth watching, the bargains worth pursuing and the news worth reading. Editors, gold miners and detectives are mostly in the sorting business.
Organized education uses sorting both as a motivation tool and a way to ensure that the graduates it produces meet spec.
Not only do we sort, we are often sorted.
Freelancers and job seekers are sorted into groups, and the best ones sort their potential clients and clients before wasting their time.
Lazy sorting is distracting, expensive and often toxic. Relying on false proxies, easily measured but irrelevant, is a common sorting trap.
And getting better at sorting might be the single most effective improvement we can make in our work. It’s not difficult to improve if we focus on it.
February 4, 2026
Sports analogies often let us down.
A colleague was explaining how measurement was difficult in many organizations, unlike a basketball game, where the time, the score and the stats are clear and obvious.
He said, “everybody wants to win.” Depending on how you define ‘win’, this is demonstrably untrue.
It seems that among professional athletes, everyone does want to win, all things being equal. But all things are rarely equal.
Perhaps a player wanted to celebrate with friends a day or two before the game instead of watching game tapes. Or maybe they wanted to think for a moment, just a moment, about a conflict they recently had, instead of being supernaturally focused. Or it could be that they’re protecting their body or their psyche rather than risking everything right now, in this particular moment.
Under the circumstances, committed professionals often choose to do their best to meet the specified goals. But the circumstances are rarely evenly distributed.
What everybody wants is what they want.
It helps to do the work to understand why things aren’t the same for each individual, and even better, how to create the conditions for culture and systems to make the goals you seek more likely to be met.
When we get smart about what we mean by winning, we can build a more resilient and aligned organization.
February 3, 2026
Precision requires producing the same results each time. Repeatable, measurable, dependable.
Accuracy means hitting the target.
The only way to consistently be accurate is to be precise.
But there are plenty of precision methods that don’t yield the most desired outcomes.
Simon Winchester’s book on precision is magnificent. As we enter a new age of automation, understanding the thrills and costs of previous revolutions adds a useful perspective.
And you’ll learn about the person who invented shoe sizes as well as the time Queen Victoria hit a bullseye with a rifle.
The world we live in is recent, and was created by a revolution in precision. We’re still working on accuracy.
February 2, 2026
This is the hallmark of projects that turn out to be worth doing.
The trouble might be a symptom that we’re onto something that others don’t care enough to do.
And the things that are obviously worth doing are probably already being done.
February 1, 2026
