Go Touch Grass

"Done is better than perfect." You've heard it. You've said it. You've put it in a retro. It's not wrong. It's just not the whole picture. Because done in the wrong direction, done past the point where it makes sense, done without noticing what it's crowding out — those are their own problems. The garden taught me that.

Stick with me.

There's actual science behind why being outside is good for you. Vitamin D, something in our nervous systems that responds to green things. One sentence, that's all it gets. What I care about is what ten minutes a day in the dirt taught me about running projects, managing people, and knowing when I was the problem.

I didn't expect gardening to sharpen my PM instincts. I expected tomatoes, some beans, and was irresponsibly optimistic about strawberries.

What I got was a mirror.

A cucumber left alone for a week will grow sideways. Not because it's broken. Because nobody guided it up the trellis while it was still small enough to redirect. A bean without support does the same thing. It reaches, finds nothing, and sprawls. Ten minutes of attention would have fixed it.

Sounds like a standup.

The fifteen-minute check-in that feels optional is the same thing. You skip it because nothing's on fire. Two weeks later you're untangling a dependency nobody flagged, managing a stakeholder who's been quietly disengaged, wondering how the scope got this wide. The weed didn't appear overnight. You just stopped looking.

Small, consistent attention prevents the kind of drift that requires painful intervention. That's not a productivity tip. That's just what happens when you show up regularly to something that's growing whether you're watching or not.

The harder lessons took longer.

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit this, but thinning carrots feels wrong. You planted seeds, they sprouted, they're alive. Pulling some of them so the others can actually develop runs against every instinct to protect what you started. But if you don't thin them, you get a tangle of stunted roots and no real harvest. The plants aren't failing. They're just too close together to thrive.

I've had to make that call on projects. A deliverable that made sense in isolation but was crowding everything around it. A reporting structure that worked for one workstream and was quietly breaking three others. You course correct or you cut your losses. The garden doesn't let you pretend the math is different than it is.

Neither does a project running out of runway.

The one that stays with me is the squash.

I planted a seed without knowing what it was. I let it grow because it was growing, and that felt like enough of a reason. By the time I understood what I had, it was already crowding everything around it. Not malicious. Just big. And getting bigger.

I uprooted it and replanted it somewhere it had room.

I hired a PM once who was eager to prove herself, which I respected. What I didn't see coming was how that energy landed on the team. Abrasive toward decisions. Dismissive in ways people noticed but didn't name. Motivation dropped. Morale followed. Energy is contagious in both directions, and the direction we were heading wasn't good.

She wasn't a bad PM. She was a squash in a too-small container garden.

The redirect was uncomfortable. What came after was better, for her and for the team. I didn't know that going in. I just knew the math had changed.

Here's what I didn't say yet: I know what it feels like to be that plant.

I was working with a client I genuinely liked. The PM work was good. Websites, digital assets, work I was proud of. But I kept saying yes when the scope expanded. Operations support. Then more. Then something adjacent to chief of staff with no real name. I told myself it was because I cared about the work, and that was true. What was also true is that I didn't want to disappoint someone I had a real relationship with. So I kept saying yes, and I kept sprawling, until I was doing four jobs with the bandwidth of one and none of them particularly well.

I was the squash.

The engagement ended without drama. The needs had shifted; new resources came in better suited to what the roles had become. A new plant for that spot. In this case, multiple plants, and multiple roles that better fit the conditions. I didn't experience it as failure. The garden just needed something different there. That's the hardest lesson as a gardener and as a PM: it's okay to pull a plant and put in a new one. Your harvest will thank you.

Any gardener worth their salt can talk about companion planting. Certain plants grown together protect each other. They ward off what would otherwise drain them. They create conditions where everything nearby does better. You don't fully understand it until you've experienced the alternative.

When I got replanted, I found that. Colleagues who celebrated small wins. Who offered grace when things were hard. Who pushed back in ways that made the work better instead of making the room smaller. And I got to become that for others too — leading a team of women, helping them grow, partnering with clients who made the work feel like it was going somewhere worth going. The right environment isn't just the absence of the wrong conditions. It's the presence of the right ones. That distinction matters more than I knew before I felt it.

Done is better than perfect, sure. But done in the right conditions, surrounded by the right people, in a role that actually fits what you're built for — that's a different thing entirely. That's not just finishing. That's growing.

The patterns are the same whether you're managing a project or tending something that grows in actual dirt. The cucumber needs guidance before it sprawls. The carrots need thinning before the harvest fails. The squash needs room, and so do you.

Sometimes you're the gardener making the call. Sometimes you're the plant that needs to be moved.

The soil is more honest about it than most organizations are.

Go touch grass.