Creating a Slowdown list

“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results.”

Albert Einstein

In your work, how often do you repeat the same mistakes whilst at the time, thinking you’re using data and logic to reinforce your decision?

Your memory can play tricks on your and is biased – it’s called confirmation bias.

A tool that can support you in this is a Slowdown list.

Did the milestone slip by 2 days? Write down what happened. What factors lead to it. The responsible person. The duration & knock on effect it had.

By having this data, either in a cyclical review, quarterly review or project retrospective, you can see the issues that consistently go wrong and you’re able to put process in place to fix, or at least mitigate, those issues.

I use a synced notepad file on my desktop for the capture of information, then input the data at the next review date in software such as Notion.

Use whatever tools work best. If you can track and measure what matters, you can help support future workflows and pipelines.

Projects will never be 100% smooth operations, but you can keep iterating with data to get as close as you can.