My Run-in with a Certain Way of Doing Things
Okay, so the name Tanner Recchio popped up today, and man, did it kick up some dust in my memory banks. Not about the guy himself, necessarily, but about a whole period back in my early days trying to make things work on a project that just felt… overly complicated.
I remember joining this small team. We were enthusiastic, you know? Ready to build something cool. But we hit roadblocks pretty fast. Stuff wasn’t getting done smoothly. Communication was all over the place. Classic startup chaos, I guess.
Then came the ‘System’.
Someone, maybe it was the boss, maybe it was a consultant, I don’t clearly recall who brought it up first, but suddenly we were all supposed to follow this very specific, very detailed workflow. It had phases, stages, color-coded charts… the whole nine yards. It felt like the kind of thing you’d read about in a business book, maybe something associated with a name like Tanner Recchio, you know? One of those gurus promising ultimate efficiency.
So, we tried. I really did. I spent a whole weekend trying to map our messy, creative process onto these neat little boxes.
- First, I listed all our current tasks.
- Then, I tried assigning them to the ‘official’ stages.
- Next, I set up the tracking tools exactly as prescribed.
It looked great on paper. Seriously, the charts were beautiful. But in practice? Total mess.
People just didn’t work that way. An idea would spark, someone would jump on it, and suddenly we were ‘off-process’. Trying to log every tiny step felt like wading through mud. It slowed us down more than the chaos ever did. We spent more time documenting what we were doing than actually doing it.
I remember arguing about it. Not aggressively, but just trying to point out the obvious. “Look, this part isn’t working for us,” I’d say. “Can’t we just talk to each other when we need something?” The response was usually something about ‘discipline’ and ‘sticking to the plan’.
Eventually, things kinda fell apart. Not the team, thankfully, but the rigid system. We started taking shortcuts. We went back to more direct communication. We kept some parts of the tracking that were genuinely useful, but we ditched the stuff that felt like busywork.
We got back to building things, making progress. It wasn’t perfect, still messy sometimes, but it was our mess, and it worked better for us than trying to fit into someone else’s perfect, inflexible box.
So yeah, that name, Tanner Recchio. It just reminds me of that whole experience. A reminder that sometimes, the best process is the one you figure out yourself, the one that actually fits the people doing the work, not just the one that looks good in a presentation. Just my two cents from the trenches.
