Your Time Starts Now

A case study in the value of thinking and planning

For Thanksgiving week, I thought I’d do something a little bit fun.

Taking a step back first, my taste usually runs to the esoteric and cerebral. If I had to pick a favorite TV series, it would probably be Borgen. I can wax lyrical for hours about the genius of I Am Love. And I distinctly remember in high school, for a poetry memorization assignment, my teacher being surprised that I had gravitated to the somewhat impenetrable Wallace Stevens.

But during lockdown in 2020, I discovered the British series Taskmaster. It’s absurd, and it’s great.

If you’re unfamiliar, the series brings together five comedians and sets them completely pointless tasks, which are then judged by one of the two co-hosts, also a comedian by trade. Choreograph the most beautiful dance routine to your choice of ringtone. Paint the best picture of a rainbow in a pitch black room. Conceal a whole pineapple on your body as best you can.

It’s entertaining and funny, sure.

The series is also a great case study in the value of thinking slow and acting fast, the value of planning. The candidates who get the best scores — especially the ones who are able to get high scores consistently — tend to take time to step back, think, and strategize before they dive in and make an attempt.

I love this because it shows how universal this idea is. Even when candidates have extremely limited time — sometimes they only have one or two minutes to complete the challenge — there are cases on the series where taking the majority of the time to plan still produces better results than diving in immediately. This principle holds for something as ludicrous and pointless rolling coconuts down a ramp and trying to knock down the fewest bowling pins as much as it does for building a giant bridge.

It’s almost never a good idea to “just get going” if your goal is winning. The cases where that strategy works, I always feel like the candidate gets lucky or, through a stroke of luck in a different way, they happen to be an expert in whatever the task demands.

A favorite example exploited semantic ambiguity to make the goal a lot easier to achieve. The competitors were asked to place three exercise balls on top of a yoga mat that was, when the task began, perched on the top of a hill.

The obvious strategy that most people used was the naïve one: laboriously run the exercise balls up the hill and put them on the yoga mat.

Better contestants gave this a little bit of thought, and realized that the exercise balls might not stay put once they’d brought them up the hill, so came up with a way to weigh them down or otherwise keep them in place.

But one competitor had a better idea: why not bring the yoga mat to the exercise balls instead of the other way around? As you can see, this winds up being a vastly better strategy even as, I imagine, Richard Osman probably spent a bit more time up front thinking. It doesn’t make a difference not to go pell-mell immediately if you can give yourself a systematic advantage.

Sometimes it doesn’t even require that much planning to make a huge difference.

Another favorite asked competitors to pop a balloon filled with water using different tools that “cost” time. As in, for every dart or rock they used to try and pop the balloon, a certain amount of time was added to their clock. The fastest to pop the balloon got the most points.

A little bit of thought and it becomes clear that even though the scissors — which are basically an instant solution — are the most expensive, the difficulty of completing the task otherwise makes them a great strategy. Unless you can get the balloon in one shot, you’re going to spend more time using the “cheaper” options.

This is also a great demonstration of the value in starting small, iterating, and finding ways to fail cheaply. Only one competitor successfully pops the balloon without eventually giving up and buying the scissors. She takes a relatively thoughtful, iterative approach, at one point using the free rubber ducks to practice her aim, rather than failing with a more expensive strategy using items that added time to her clock.

Of course, the series is about entertaining and laughs as much as it is about the competition. The people who get the lowest scores are often the most entertaining. Even so, I think there’s a lot we can learn in a product and company building context. As tempting as it may be to dive right in — especially when there’s time pressure — it almost always makes more sense to take a step back and think about the problem before acting. A bias for thinking, not for action.

Enjoy this? Have an idea for something you’d like a perspective on? Drop me a line: I’d love to hear from you.