The System That Survives Tuesday
Most systems are designed for Monday. Real life happens on Tuesday.
I've built a lot of systems in my career. Event runbooks. Crew coordination workflows. Client reporting dashboards. Content pipelines. Lead tracking databases.
Most of them died on Tuesday.
Here's what I mean: Monday is when you design the system. You're fresh. You're optimistic. You can see exactly how everything should flow. The logic is elegant. The fields are comprehensive. The automation is clever.
Tuesday is when reality happens.
The client sends an email that doesn't fit any category. A crew member calls with a situation the runbook doesn't cover. Someone enters data in the wrong format and breaks the formula. The perfectly designed workflow encounters an imperfect human and everything falls apart.
The systems that survive Tuesday share a few characteristics:
They're simpler than you think they need to be. Every field you add is a potential failure point. Every automation is a potential mystery when it stops working. Complexity is a liability.
They assume human error. Not as an exception but as the norm. People will enter things wrong. They'll skip steps. They'll do the thing you explicitly told them not to do. The system has to handle that.
They focus on one thing. A system that tries to track everything tracks nothing. The best systems do one job exceptionally well and leave everything else alone.
They're built for tired people. At 10 PM, after a long day, when someone opens the system, what do they see? If the answer is "a wall of options they need to think about," you've lost. If the answer is "exactly what they need to do next," you've won.
I think about this every time I build something new. Not "will this impress someone on Monday?" but "will this survive Tuesday?"
It's a lower bar and a higher one at the same time.