Minimum Viable Nothing

Part Three: What do we do when even the smallest steps feel like they are too big to tackle?

Welcome to the (unplanned but honestly should’ve been expected) Part 3 to my ‘Minimum Viable’ series. Life has a way of reminding me that even the smallest, carefully crafted routines (yes, even those designed using a really low-stakes framework) aren’t always sustainable. And in the spirit of being honest and integral, I couldn’t ignore this reality—so here we are.

It’s the reality that what felt minimum and viable a month ago when I started writing what turned into Part 1 (where I discuss the need for such a framework), or a week ago when I published Part 2 (which dove into the actual framework) can sometimes, and all of a sudden, start to feel too big. Dammit.

Minimum Viable Bullshit

A pile of dishes in the sink, a play area scattered with toys, a once-empty dining room table that has somehow erupted with piles, and a wrist brace adorning my right arm are all staring back at me, daring me to try to fit this reality into any sort of framework.

I really thought that I had cracked the code! I thought I could streamline my life and hit peak productivity. But here I am, staring at a dining room table that got to where it was because it’s been more than a few days since I’ve stuck to my ‘15-minute daily tidy’ MVR. Was my minimum ever actually minimum enough, or have I been fooling myself into thinking I could hack my way towards getting it all done?

Minimum Viable Everything

Have you ever set a goal that felt achievable, only to realize later that even the bare minimum felt too much? We’re at the end of January now, which means the thrill and novelty of a new year is wearing off and any rest and relaxation I experienced during the holiday break has mostly evaporated from my being. The routines I set using the MVR framework seemed awesome and minimum (and viable) then, but what happens when reality sets in, the novelty wears off, and I’m back to being tired and moving through a bit of a slog?

Life happens. Moods change, colds are caught, work projects take over, wrists get injured. The small task I put in place when I was in a different headspace can suddenly feel insurmountable one day, and then the next, and before you know it you can barely see the dining room table. What happens when even the smallest of steps feel too big? To be honest, this is something I grapple with often as someone with ADHD.

If part 1 shows me working and planning from my nicely-lit desk and part 2 has me both having and eating cake, part 3 is definitely working from bed (a habit I try time and time again to break), watching TV (picture-in-picture ftw), and doing my best, wrist brace and all

When life gets overwhelming, I have two conflicting instincts that want to kick in. The first is to push through and to figure out how to make it all fit, which inevitably leads to burn out. My second instinct is to absolutely abandon it all and resume my life of daily TV marathons and not much else. I would argue that while there may be times and places where these approaches could be the right move, I’m not sure if blindly pushing through or blindly abandoning is really in my best interest.

What if there’s a way to honor both sides? To make active decisions keeping those goals in mind while also stepping back and pausing, intentionally.

There’s a difference between pressing pause and giving up. Giving up and abandoning ship, for me at least, is an action taken while almost wearing a blindfold. The going has gotten tough and so I just stop. I don’t reflect on why I need to stop and treat it like a non-decision rather than a decision.

A pause is a decision.

The line is blurry, but a pause acknowledges that for whatever reason, this isn’t working right now. It allows me to step back from what I thought was important, while evaluating why it’s not working. It gives me permission to adjust—is there a smaller action I can take? Do I need to adjust my expectations? It also gives me permission to realize the MVR that’s in place is the right one, and can help refocus after a brief intermission. It helps me clear the clutter about why I’ve fallen off the routine, and sometimes that does mean I get brutally honest about how I’m moving through life and some of the choices I’m making regarding my own prioritization.

I very much rely on momentum, so when life happens and stops that motion, I find it hard to get back up and keep moving. When I’m in motion it’s easy to keep up with the motion, but once I stop it’s easy to get stuck in the stop. Pausing is just that — like pressing pause while watching Netflix (or on a VCR, if you’d like). The video is still ready to be resumed whenever I’m ready to. Maybe I just need to grab a snack or use the bathroom and it’s a quick pause. Maybe I realize it’s my bedtime and I won’t resume the episode until the next day, but regardless it’s waiting for me dive back in.

I’m not stopping the video—I’m not closing the window or taking the tape out of the VCR, but rather intentionally pausing, to then resume, in whatever way feels right. Pausing can take a few forms.

Pausing can simply mean taking a day (or a few) off to deal with whatever has popped up—whether external roadblocks or more internal (but just as tangible and valid) changes in mood, desire, and energy level. Pausing is acknowledging that missing a few days doesn’t mean the system is broken, it really just means life is happening.

Pausing can also mean taking a look at the routines I’ve built and asking myself whether or not they’re the right routines. If I set an MVR to clean 15 minutes a day—what’s the actual goal there? Going back to the drawing board, the need I’m hoping to achieve is to keep cleaning manageable on a daily level, so I’m not spending big blocks of time over the weekend cleaning for hours on end.

Cleaning for 15 minutes is certainly a way to get there, but is there something simpler? Moving away from time-based goals to action based-goals helps me here. Instead of ‘cleaning for 15 minutes’ maybe I adjust the MVR to ‘tackle one cleaning task a day’. On low-energy days, the one cleaning task might be bringing that day’s coffee mug from my desk to the sink. On higher-energy days, maybe it’s loading and unloading the dishwasher, twice. Or it’s putting away one item from the dining room table on lower-energy days and clearing the entire table on those higher-energy days, when ‘clearing the twenty items on the dining room table’ feels like one task instead of twenty.

I’ve recently started treating these pauses as experiments, which is apt as it’s another fairly important part of Product Management and software development. When you think you have more than one way to achieve a goal or move a metric, we often run a series of experiments and analyze user behavior to see which moves the needle more.

Sometimes all solutions are winners. Sometimes, it doesn’t really do much and so the decision is “is this a good enough experience to add permanently, or should we abandon it if there are other ways to get to what we want?”. And sometimes, our ideas fail. They fail completely, or maybe they succeed in their narrow view but make something else worse because of it. The job then is to form hypotheses about why this happened, what we can learn, and what’s next.

For me, the best part of an experiment is that it offers a level of clarity. Sometimes, all I needed was a few days and some time to reflect, and when I come out of it I realize that the parameters for the routines I’ve built are actually correct, but I might need to loosen the grips of the everyday expectation. Or this routine is correct, but there’s something else I could cut down somewhere else in my life.

Sometimes though, it really is time to pivot, and that’s okay. Pivot for good, pivot for a few weeks, etc. Pausing, re-evaluating, pivoting, taking a break, experimenting, ditching the thing altogether – there’s nuance there for sure. If we know that setbacks are part of the process, our job becomes to anticipate them, acknowledge the different ways we could address these setbacks, and allow ourselves grace as we figure out how we want to address it in the moment.

Frameworks are great, but where I find they fall short is their application to real life. Everything looks great through rose-colored glasses initially, when we’re talking about concepts of a plan routine but they rarely address what happens when the going gets going. My own framework did the same in Parts 1 and 2, and so with this unplanned but very needed (for me, at least) Part 3, I’m hoping to bring us back to reality a bit.

The MVR doesn’t fail, but rather is a tool to constantly evaluate where we’re at, how much energy we have, and what else is going on in our lives. It gives us permission to pause, adjust, and yes—asks us to be brutally honest with ourselves about whether our previous definition of minimum and viable is actually the most minimum and viable? Are the things I thought were important when conceptualizing a routine actually important when I’m in the day to day, when the slog hits, and when I’m forced to adjust?

Adjusting the routine isn’t failure—it’s confirmation that we’re actually living life. And for people who are neurodivergent like myself, adjusting a routine is necessary for survival. It allows us to stay goal-oriented when those routines evolve from concepts to plans.

Have you ever found yourself needing to pause a routine? How do you know when it’s time to adjust instead of abandon? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.