Vox

Leitura de 23 min

Match your Action to Intention - Pairing Five Whats with Five Whys

Summary

This episode introduces a method for aligning daily activities with broader goals by combining the Five Whys root cause analysis technique with a new complementary tool called the Five Whats. The host explains that while the Five Whys helps abstract upward from specific incidents to systematic problems, the Five Whats helps break down abstract calendar labels into concrete activities.

The core insight is that many people label calendar events with broad terms like “focus time” or “learning,” but these labels obscure what actually happens during those blocks. By drilling down to the specific activity level—what exactly you’re doing during that time—you can then ask meaningful “why” questions about whether those activities truly serve your goals. This creates a feedback loop where you can evaluate whether your time investment matches your intentions.

The host provides practical examples, including analyzing a status meeting where participants merely read out metrics versus having meaningful discussions, and examining personal learning time to determine whether reading a book or practicing code better aligns with career advancement goals. The method applies both retrospectively to existing calendar events and proactively when building an ideal schedule from scratch.

Ultimately, this approach helps create a personal time strategy similar to how companies allocate resources across projects, maintenance, and innovation. By matching actions to intentions, you can ensure your daily activities move you toward your resolutions and goals rather than drifting into ineffective patterns.

Recommendations

Tools

  • Five Whys exercise — A root cause analysis technique used in post-incident reviews to trace problems back to systematic issues by repeatedly asking ‘why.’
  • Five Whats exercise — A complementary tool introduced in this episode that breaks down abstract calendar labels into concrete activities to enable better goal alignment.
  • Calendar analysis — Using your calendar as a tool to examine how you actually spend time versus how you intend to spend it, creating a personal time strategy.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to Five Whys and pairing with new tool — The episode introduces the Five Whys exercise commonly used in post-incident reviews and retrospectives. The host announces a new complementary tool to be used alongside Five Whys, applicable not just retrospectively but also for planning and analysis. This sets up the main theme of matching actions to intentions.
  • 00:02:45 — Operationalizing goals through time strategy — Discussion shifts to how most people lack a strategy for spending their time, unlike companies that allocate resources intentionally. The host proposes creating a personal time strategy by examining existing time investments and their returns. This is framed as similar to budgeting—analyzing what your time ‘spend’ is buying you.
  • 00:07:01 — Explaining Five Whys with concrete example — The host walks through a detailed example of applying Five Whys to a server overload incident during a sale. The analysis reveals communication gaps between marketing and DevOps teams, showing how the method uncovers systematic problems. This demonstrates how Five Whys moves from specific incidents to abstract root causes.
  • 00:10:44 — Introducing the Five Whats exercise — The host introduces the Five Whats as a way to move in the opposite direction from Five Whys—breaking down abstract calendar labels into concrete activities. Instead of asking ‘why’ about incidents, you ask ‘what’ exactly happens during labeled time blocks like ‘focus time’ or ‘status meetings.’ This reveals the actual activities behind the abstractions.
  • 00:12:43 — Example: Analyzing a status meeting with Five Whats — Using a lead engineer’s status meeting as an example, the host shows how breaking it down reveals participants merely reading metrics rather than having meaningful discussions. Applying ‘why’ questions to these activities exposes whether they serve useful purposes or could be automated. This illustrates how the pairing helps uncover misalignments between activities and goals.
  • 00:15:41 — Applying to personal learning and goal alignment — The method is applied to personal development time labeled as ‘learning.’ Breaking it down to specific activities like reading a book versus practicing code allows more meaningful ‘why’ questions about how each serves career goals. This moves beyond generic ‘learning is good’ to intentional activity selection that directly advances objectives.
  • 00:17:21 — Two approaches: analyzing existing vs. building ideal schedule — The host presents two ways to use the method: analyzing existing calendar events to see how they map to goals, or building an ideal schedule from scratch based on goal-aligned activities. The key is specifying activities rather than broad labels when planning, as different people might interpret the same label in wildly different ways with varying effectiveness.
  • 00:19:48 — Extending to personal life and concluding thoughts — The host suggests applying the same critical thinking to personal life, like examining what ‘family time’ actually entails versus what you want it to achieve. The episode concludes by encouraging listeners to break down abstract concepts in their calendars and match their whats with their whys for more intentional time use.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2025-01-15T08:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:22:48

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] You’ve probably heard of the five whys exercise.

[00:00:15] This is a root cause analysis exercise.

[00:00:19] If you’ve ever been a part of an incident, some kind of outage in your job, then you

[00:00:24] may have encountered the five whys in the post-incident review or some kind of retro,

[00:00:31] a post-mortem.

[00:00:33] But in today’s episode, I want to give you an additional tool to pair with the five whys.

[00:00:40] And I want you to be able to use this not only in a post-mortem, in a kind of retrospective

[00:00:47] fashion, but also in a planning position or in an analysis position.

[00:00:57] We’ve recently talked about setting up your New Year’s resolutions for success, upgrading

[00:01:04] your resolutions.

[00:01:06] If you missed that episode, go back to the last episode of Developer Tea.

[00:01:10] That’s where we talk about it.

[00:01:12] And in this episode, we talk about a handful of things.

[00:01:16] One of the things we talk about is ensuring that you have some kind of clear metrics,

[00:01:25] et cetera.

[00:01:27] One of the things we don’t talk about, though, is matching your action to your intention.

[00:01:35] In other words, how are you going to actually operationalize, connect your energy, your

[00:01:42] spend, your day-to-day, your schedule?

[00:01:44] How are you going to connect that to those goals, whether it’s a SMART goal or however

[00:01:51] you’ve set those resolutions?

[00:01:53] How are you going to actually meet them?

[00:01:56] A lot of the resolutions, as we talked about in the last episode, especially personal resolutions,

[00:02:01] they tend to be avoiding something, right?

[00:02:05] So operationalizing your avoiding probably depends on replacement.

[00:02:11] Okay, that’s a side tip for today’s episode.

[00:02:16] You’re unlikely to succeed in your avoidance if you don’t have a replacement.

[00:02:22] This is reasonably backed up by research that our avoidance techniques tend to fail unless

[00:02:29] we have some alternative action, some alternative activity, for example.

[00:02:38] All right, so if you’re operationalizing the things, your goals that you have, then you

[00:02:45] should be looking at your time.

[00:02:48] You should be looking at how you spend your time.

[00:02:51] The vast majority of people who are listening to this episode right now, if I were to ask

[00:02:55] you how did you spend your week last week, the first tool you’re likely to pull up, there’s

[00:03:00] nothing wrong with this, is your calendar.

[00:03:04] This is for a couple of reasons.

[00:03:06] It’s hard to remember.

[00:03:07] It’s hard to remember.

[00:03:08] What all did I do last week?

[00:03:09] I’m going to go back and look at some kind of tracking.

[00:03:12] Some scheduling tool is a good way to figure out where your time went.

[00:03:17] But it’s also the case that very often we are not living out our goals.

[00:03:24] We couldn’t say that we have a strategy, okay, then this is what today’s episode is about,

[00:03:31] that we have a strategy for where our time goes.

[00:03:36] Companies do this pretty regularly.

[00:03:38] They determine what is the portfolio of our energy spend.

[00:03:44] In other words, what percent of our resources do we want to put towards new projects versus

[00:03:53] maintenance work?

[00:03:55] What kind of investment do we want to make on innovation?

[00:03:59] What kind of investment do we want to make on fixing bugs, for example?

[00:04:06] You may have a percentage allocation.

[00:04:09] This is a strategy.

[00:04:11] This is a forethought strategy for how you’d like to spend your time.

[00:04:14] And most individuals don’t necessarily have one of these, don’t necessarily have a strategy

[00:04:22] for how to spend their time.

[00:04:23] So in today’s episode, I want to give you some basic tools for starting down the road

[00:04:28] of creating that time strategy, creating your personal resource spending strategy.

[00:04:35] All right.

[00:04:36] This is very similar to budgeting.

[00:04:38] It’s very similar to, you know, any kind of allocation exercise that you might have.

[00:04:44] But in today’s episode, I want to talk about taking your existing spins and rationalizing

[00:04:54] exactly what those spins are, are buying you.

[00:04:59] What is your investment and what is your return?

[00:05:02] We’re going to talk about that right after we talk about today’s sponsor.

[00:05:10] Speaking of investments, if you are building websites by hand, if you are spending time

[00:05:20] on UI coding and hosting and security, and you don’t have all of the experience to do

[00:05:28] infrastructure maintenance, if you just want to build a website, then you probably have

[00:05:34] dreams of making those things easier.

[00:05:38] Maybe some kind of automated process or a builder.

[00:05:43] That would be great, right?

[00:05:44] A website builder that actually works.

[00:05:46] It doesn’t have limited control.

[00:05:47] Well, that’s exactly what you’re going to get with Wix Studio.

[00:05:52] It’s a node-based builder that lets you add full stack JavaScript code to any site.

[00:05:58] You’re going to spend less time on UI coding, hosting, security, et cetera.

[00:06:02] And instead, you’re going to be developing in your preferred coding environment online

[00:06:05] at a VS code-based IDE locally through a GitHub integration, however you prefer.

[00:06:12] And either way, with Wix Studio, you’re deploying in a click.

[00:06:15] You don’t have to worry about maintaining the infrastructure because it’s automatically

[00:06:18] maintained for your peace of mind.

[00:06:21] You can extend and replace hundreds of powerful business solutions and custom-built features

[00:06:26] with Wix’s APIs and integrations.

[00:06:29] And when you need to speed things up, Wix Studio’s AI assistant is on hand to generate

[00:06:34] tailored code snippets, troubleshoot bugs, and retrieve product answers in seconds.

[00:06:40] If you want to work in a developer-first ecosystem, head over to wixstudio.com.

[00:06:44] That’s w-i-x-studio.com.

[00:06:47] Thanks again to Wix for sponsoring today’s episode of Developer Team.

[00:06:56] So we’re talking about this idea of the five Ys.

[00:07:01] And usually what we do with the five Ys is we go from some instance and we’re trying

[00:07:09] to abstract outward.

[00:07:11] So think about this.

[00:07:13] Something happened.

[00:07:14] Well, why did it happen?

[00:07:15] We’re trying to find the root cause, right?

[00:07:18] And eventually we will get to something that is probably systematic.

[00:07:25] But at each layer, there might be some action to take, which is why we want to do the five

[00:07:30] Ys rather than trying to jump to some intuitive, systematic problem.

[00:07:36] Also it should be noted that the five Ys may have multiple branches.

[00:07:40] This is one of the criticisms of the framework, that one Y doesn’t necessarily lead to only

[00:07:47] one other Y.

[00:07:49] You may have a tree structure.

[00:07:51] There could be multiple Ys, multiple factors leading into whatever that lower level thing

[00:07:56] is.

[00:07:58] So you can imagine, let’s say we got a denial of service error.

[00:08:05] Our server was overloaded.

[00:08:07] That’s the first why, that we had a lot of traffic.

[00:08:10] Why did we have a lot of traffic?

[00:08:13] We had a sale and we sent a bunch of marketing emails out all at the same time.

[00:08:18] And so everybody who received the email is all clicking the link at the same time.

[00:08:23] And we didn’t coordinate any of our scaling infrastructure to handle this load.

[00:08:31] And I’m going to walk through this whole thing just to kind of get to what we think is like

[00:08:35] a systematic problem.

[00:08:36] Okay, so why did that happen?

[00:08:39] Well, we could say, well, we released the sale because it’s a part of our normal ops.

[00:08:43] Okay, that’s kind of the end of that chain.

[00:08:47] But why did we not coordinate our sale release with some kind of DevOps response or pre-scaling

[00:08:57] or something like that?

[00:08:59] That might be one chain to follow.

[00:09:01] And you could say, well, those two teams don’t necessarily operate with some kind of overlap.

[00:09:08] They didn’t know.

[00:09:09] The DevOps team didn’t have any visibility into these releases.

[00:09:11] Okay, there’s some kind of operational problem to solve there.

[00:09:18] Maybe in the future, you could improve by having these two functions communicate better.

[00:09:25] They’re going to work a little bit closer together.

[00:09:28] So in the future, maybe the emails are released as a trickle release so that the overload

[00:09:38] is naturally managed by balancing the release of the links.

[00:09:44] Or if there’s a timed sale, if we do need to release all these links at the same time,

[00:09:48] we can pre-scale our servers or whatever the plan is to manage that, right?

[00:09:54] You could ask one more why.

[00:09:56] How did we end up here is what that next level would be.

[00:10:00] Why don’t these two departments communicate?

[00:10:04] There may be some insights there.

[00:10:06] All right.

[00:10:07] So we’re not going to continue.

[00:10:08] We could go into multiple branches of this.

[00:10:10] There’s a lot of different things we could talk about that.

[00:10:12] But instead, what I want to talk about is how do we apply this back to our calendar

[00:10:18] example?

[00:10:19] Because interestingly, calendar events or your meetings, these process meetings, tend

[00:10:28] to be the abstracted thing.

[00:10:31] They’re on the other side of the why.

[00:10:36] You would abstract up to one of these meetings.

[00:10:40] So instead, what I want you to do is move it back down the other direction.

[00:10:44] And we’re going to do that with the five what’s.

[00:10:47] It’s not a very catchy name, so I doubt it’s going to go viral from this episode.

[00:10:53] But the idea is to break down what exactly is happening in the meeting.

[00:11:01] What exactly are you doing, right?

[00:11:06] What exactly is it that you’re doing with that focus block of time?

[00:11:10] And the goal is to move you away from abstraction, which is things like labels, right?

[00:11:18] You have a label of focus time, but inside of that focus time could be a whole vast array

[00:11:25] of things that you consider or you have labeled focus time.

[00:11:30] It might be administrative work that is more reactive in nature.

[00:11:35] Or it could be proactive work or something in between.

[00:11:39] It might be something like learning or investigation, somewhere in between reactive and proactive.

[00:11:46] And once you can get down to the more action-oriented or activity-oriented description of what you’re

[00:11:55] doing with your time, then you can perform a why and then go through the five whys again.

[00:12:04] So what is it about this activity that matters?

[00:12:08] Why are we doing this?

[00:12:11] And what this can do is it can lead you to recognizing that the way that you’re spending

[00:12:16] your time has some goal that the activity doesn’t necessarily line up with.

[00:12:25] In other words, the things that you are doing have evolved over time and perhaps have gotten

[00:12:31] away from your actual goals.

[00:12:35] I’ll give you a couple of simple examples of this.

[00:12:38] Let’s imagine that you have on your calendar, you have a status meeting.

[00:12:43] You’re a lead engineer.

[00:12:44] You have a status meeting with your manager and your manager’s manager and all the other

[00:12:48] lead engineers, okay, that are, I guess, like a peer-level relationship with you that report

[00:12:55] to the same manager.

[00:12:56] Okay, why do you have this or what is happening?

[00:12:59] Let’s start there, right?

[00:13:01] So we’re going to break this down into the activities that are occurring within this

[00:13:05] meeting, a status meeting.

[00:13:07] In this case, let’s imagine that your status is each of you going through and giving metrics

[00:13:15] for the amount of code that you’ve generated in the last two weeks, okay?

[00:13:22] So notice that what we’ve called a status meeting is actually, from an activity standpoint,

[00:13:33] all you’re doing is reading out data.

[00:13:36] Now, you can ask some questions at this stage, okay, what about this matters or what about

[00:13:43] this is achieving my goals or what are the goals of this particular activity?

[00:13:50] You could also break that down further and say, okay, what metrics are we sharing?

[00:13:56] Are we sharing, you know, how many bugs were closed?

[00:13:59] Are we sharing, you know, and you could get down to the lowest level activity.

[00:14:05] And then you build back up to a why, right?

[00:14:09] So why are we sharing these metrics?

[00:14:14] The concept of a status meeting tends to have a wide variety and a lot of you probably have

[00:14:20] status meetings, some kind of status meeting on your calendar right now, right?

[00:14:25] There are a wide variety of reasons for a status meeting to exist.

[00:14:32] So if you start asking the why question in this example, it sounds like the why here

[00:14:40] is to produce the metrics.

[00:14:43] Now, you could ask the question, okay, what about those metrics is useful in this forum,

[00:14:51] right?

[00:14:52] Why are we sharing these metrics here?

[00:14:55] Because the next step in these why questions is probably going to lead you to asking more

[00:15:01] important questions like, why couldn’t this be done in an automated fashion?

[00:15:06] Why couldn’t we just generate these metrics for our, you know, reporting chain, right?

[00:15:14] So if you start asking these questions, you’re likely going to uncover, you know, the underlying

[00:15:20] motivations for these meetings and or you’re going to uncover opportunities, okay?

[00:15:28] And this doesn’t just apply to meetings that you are pulled into.

[00:15:30] This applies to how you spend your time.

[00:15:33] So if you’re saying, okay, I’m going to spend 45 minutes every week on Fridays, learning.

[00:15:41] Okay, what does learning entail for you?

[00:15:44] Maybe it entails reading a book.

[00:15:47] Maybe it entails actually practicing with code.

[00:15:51] Why is it that you’re reading a book?

[00:15:53] Why is it you’re practicing code?

[00:15:56] Not why do you want to learn?

[00:15:58] The important thing here is that you break it down to the activity.

[00:16:01] And that’s really the insight I want you to walk away with because why do you want to

[00:16:05] learn?

[00:16:06] Most people are going to answer that by saying, you know, something generic.

[00:16:10] I want to always learn in my career.

[00:16:12] It’s important to learn.

[00:16:13] I’m going to grow in my career the more that I learn.

[00:16:16] But if you ask yourself about the activity, why are you reading this book versus why are

[00:16:22] you practicing code?

[00:16:24] You may have a closer insight into how that’s going to help your career, right?

[00:16:30] This particular book was recommended to me by my manager because they believe that it

[00:16:37] provides insight into leadership skills and I want to build my leadership skills.

[00:16:44] That would be one version of answering the why.

[00:16:48] That’s very different than just the generic, you know, why do you want to learn response.

[00:16:54] So again, I want you to kind of zoom out for a minute.

[00:16:59] And I want you to think about those goals that you have that we talked about in the

[00:17:03] last episode, the goals that you’re developing over time, your resolutions, your resolve,

[00:17:11] the things that you care about investing in and aligning your time to those goals.

[00:17:16] So as you’re looking through your calendar, okay, there’s kind of two ways to think about

[00:17:21] this.

[00:17:22] One is by looking at your existing calendar and trying to understand how do my activities

[00:17:27] that I currently engage in, how do they map to my goals?

[00:17:32] How do they forward my goals?

[00:17:34] How do I want to shape the existing things that I’m doing in a way that can help me achieve

[00:17:40] my goals?

[00:17:41] Maybe you have things that are absolutely contributing to those broader goals that you

[00:17:45] have.

[00:17:47] Another way to think about this is to start with a clean slate.

[00:17:51] We’ve talked about this probably a hundred times on the show.

[00:17:53] I don’t know exactly how many times, but the idea is to build your ideal schedule, right?

[00:18:00] To take the goals that you have and to develop some list of activities, right?

[00:18:05] Again, we want to start with these activities rather than broad labels, because the broad

[00:18:10] labels are going to abstract away the ability to ask why, okay?

[00:18:18] So if you said, oh, I’m going to work on career progression, that’s a label.

[00:18:23] That’s a broad label.

[00:18:24] There’s no activity described in career progression.

[00:18:27] So when you, when you sit down at your desk, what exactly are you doing?

[00:18:31] Okay.

[00:18:32] If you had 10 people who all had the same calendar, uh, event called work on career

[00:18:38] progression, all 10, all 10 of them might do something wildly different.

[00:18:44] And in fact, all 10 of them may have activities that have wildly different levels of effectiveness.

[00:18:50] Okay.

[00:18:51] Be more specific.

[00:18:52] Be more activity oriented when you’re talking about planning out your days, planning out

[00:18:58] that ideal schedule.

[00:19:00] What kinds of activities do you want to participate in?

[00:19:03] At what ratios?

[00:19:05] To what degree, uh, do you want to balance, you know, building versus managing?

[00:19:11] Maybe you want to pursue an IC track.

[00:19:14] Maybe you want to pursue a management track.

[00:19:16] Those are some broad level goals that you can then more tactically match up your activities

[00:19:24] with.

[00:19:25] Right?

[00:19:26] Try, try to get down to the activity level so then you can match your what with your

[00:19:33] why.

[00:19:34] Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode of developer tea.

[00:19:37] I hope this conceptually makes sense to you breaking down, uh, these otherwise abstract

[00:19:43] concepts that, that you label in your calendar, you know, thinking about things like even

[00:19:48] in your personal life, you could do the same thing with your personal life, breaking down

[00:19:52] family time.

[00:19:53] What are you doing in your family time?

[00:19:55] If you’re all sitting around looking at your phones, are you actually achieving the thing

[00:19:59] that you wanted to achieve when you said Friday night is family night?

[00:20:04] Or is there a different set of activities that you want to engage in?

[00:20:07] This is the kind of critical thinking I want to trigger in your brain with this episode.

[00:20:12] I hope you enjoyed it.

[00:20:13] Thank you again to today’s sponsor Wix Wix has built a website builder, uh, Wix studio,

[00:20:21] the developer first ecosystem that you can spend less time on tedious tasks and more

[00:20:26] on the functionalities that matter the most to you and to your customers.

[00:20:30] You can develop online or locally, uh, whatever your workflow is, it’s going to work with

[00:20:35] Wix studio.

[00:20:36] I’m going to extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions and ship faster

[00:20:40] with Wix studios, AI code assistant.

[00:20:42] All of that is wrapped up in an automatically maintained infrastructure for that total peace

[00:20:47] of mind.

[00:20:48] And so you don’t have to go and learn a bunch about infra working to develop our first ecosystem

[00:20:52] at wix studio.com.

[00:20:53] Thank you again to Wix.

[00:20:55] Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

[00:20:57] Uh, we’re trying, moving right along into our 11th year.

[00:21:02] Uh, we’ve gone 10 years as of the fifth of this month and you all have made that possible.

[00:21:07] I’m incredibly grateful that we still have, you know, listeners, some people who’ve been

[00:21:12] listening for, for a decade to the show, which blows my mind, um, that we still have folks

[00:21:18] hanging around listening to the show that long.

[00:21:21] I hope it’s been valuable to you.

[00:21:22] If it has been valuable, I’m going to stop right here and ask you to do two simple things.

[00:21:28] These are the things that give this show the ability to continue.

[00:21:32] And I really do mean it.

[00:21:33] If you’ve never shared the show with somebody, I am encouraging you right now.

[00:21:37] This will, by the way, it’s, it’s a benefit to you.

[00:21:40] This person is going to think that you have given them something, even though all you

[00:21:44] did was share a link, um, you know, the, and that’s not because this show is the most wonderful

[00:21:50] thing to ever exist.

[00:21:51] It’s just basic psychology.

[00:21:53] You’re thinking about them, you send them something that you think is going to be valuable

[00:21:55] to them.

[00:21:56] Uh, that is a huge help to the show.

[00:21:59] It’s also a huge help to you, uh, for giving them something and you’re building your relationship

[00:22:04] with that person.

[00:22:05] So that is a massive, massive help, uh, to the show and then leaving a review.

[00:22:11] This one’s less helpful to you, but certainly helps the show continue to succeed.

[00:22:16] Uh, you know, we’ve built 10 years of content.

[00:22:20] All of it is free.

[00:22:21] All of it is free.

[00:22:22] Um, all you have to do is spend your time listening to it.

[00:22:26] What I’m asking for in return is one review, right?

[00:22:29] If you haven’t left a review for the show, please leave a review in your podcasting platform

[00:22:33] of choice iTunes.

[00:22:35] If you are a split between multiples, thanks so much for listening and until next time,

[00:22:40] enjoy your tea.

Visão de gráfico