Every company I’ve been a part of has had more work to do than people to do it. (Has there ever been a company with too many people and not enough work to do? Not for long.) Sometimes the gap between need and output is relatively small, and a team can almost keep up, but more often – especially if a company is aggressive about identifying opportunities – the gap is much, much bigger.

This can lead to lots of frustration. In my last post, I wrote about how great leaders help their teams win by defining success in ways that are achievable. In this post, I’ll focus on getting to work and making it manageable.

My current product organization is responsible for a lot more products than we have teams, including nearly a dozen products built by companies we’ve acquired over the past two years. Inevitably, at any given time, there are products we’re not working on, or even thinking much about. This can be hard to stomach. But the reality is that we’ll never have enough people or time to adequately address all of the issues and opportunities in front of us. In order to wrap our heads around the challenge, we need a different way to think about it.

That’s where I turn to Kurt Vonnegut.

In his article, On the Work to be Done, first published in the May 28, 1998 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Vonnegut writes brilliantly in the topic of getting to work. Although he’s writing about building a better world, Vonnegut’s words apply to building better software too. Here goes:

As I read the Book of Genesis, God didn’t give Adam and Eve a whole planet.

He gave them a manageable piece of property, for the sake of discussion let’s say 200 acres.

I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order.

If God had given Adam and Eve the entire world, what would they have done? It’s easy to imagine them running naked through the jungle, shaking their fists, fighting back tears, screaming, “we’re not ready to take care of all these animals – we don’t even have clothes yet!”

In Vonnegut’s telling, God doesn’t overwhelm Adam and Eve, he gives them “some small part of the planet” – just as much as they can handle.  Adam and Eve weren’t responsible for the entire planet, I remind my team, and you’re not responsible for the entire platform. You’re divided into product teams for a reason, so that one group can focus on financial management while another focuses on mobile applications and so on. If you try to eat the elephant (or the forbidden apple?) in one bite, you’ll get sick. Vonnegut continues:

What painters and sculptors and writers do, incidentally, is put very small properties indeed into good order, as best they can.

A painter thinks, “I can’t fix the whole planet, but I can at least make this square of canvas what it ought to be.” And a sculptor thinks the same thing about a lump of clay or marble. A writer thinks the same about a piece of paper, conventionally eleven inches long and eight-and-a-half inches wide.

A product manager is responsible for creating an awesome product. A user experience designer is responsible for creating an awesome experience. A software architect is responsible for creating an awesome technical architecture. And so on. Often this work happens incrementally, over time. The good and bad news? The work is never done.

So here’s the challenge: take your 200 acres (or lines of code) and put them in decent order. Make them exactly what they’re meant to be, or make them even better. After that, there’ll be another 200 acres to worry about, and then another 200 acres after that.

That sounds manageable, right?