Asking
When Not to Ask
Three situations look exactly like being stuck and are not, and telling them apart is what stops the twenty-minute rule becoming a reflex.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
How to get a staging database password
you asked2The answer was one sentence and had no owner
Why the retry limit is three and not five
you asked9The reason existed and was in one person's head
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 9 · all two you went and got
Two answers that existed only in somebody's head. The second sat in the question list for a month before it was asked.
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Four occasions that felt identical, and only one of which belongs in this record
Waiting for a colleague to come back from leave
4 hanswer: 3 minYou waited because you had decided that only they could answer. Three other people could have, and the four hours were wasted
one occasion · 4 hours spent stuck · 3 minutes of answers · the longest single wait was 4 hours
Three of these four lines are not drawn, and that is the whole of this page: an occasion with no question in it is not an occasion of being stuck. Only the fourth belongs in the record, and its error was the assumption rather than the waiting. One person’s own first month.
Three things feel exactly like being stuck and are not. Telling them apart matters, because asking in all three wastes your questions and teaches people that your questions are not serious.
One: the work is the thing
Working out why a test fails intermittently is not being stuck. It is the job.
The distinction is whether the answer exists in somebody's head. A password, a convention, a file location, a name, a reason — those are facts somebody is carrying, and twenty minutes is the right budget for recovering them.
Why the import produces two rows when it should produce one is not a fact anybody is carrying. Nobody can hand it to you, and asking converts a problem you were hired to solve into a problem for somebody else.
What is askable, in that case, is narrower: "is there anything about this component I should know before I spend a day on it?" That is a fact somebody may have.
Two: unfamiliarity
Reading an unfamiliar codebase, or an unfamiliar set of accounts, or an unfamiliar process, feels like being stuck for the first several hours and is not.
There is no question in it. There is a quantity of material you have not read yet, and the only thing that fixes it is reading. Asking somebody to explain a data model you have not looked at yet produces a twenty-minute explanation you will not retain, and you will read the thing anyway.
The useful version is to read first and then ask about the two things that did not make sense. That is a four-minute conversation instead of a twenty-minute one, and you keep it.
Three: the decision is yours
Two reasonable approaches, and you cannot tell which is wanted.
This is the one most often mishandled, because asking feels like diligence. What it actually does is hand your decision to somebody else, and doing that repeatedly in a first quarter is the surest way to be seen as somebody who needs supervising.
What to do instead is in the next note, and the short version is: decide, say what you decided and why, and offer to change it.
What they have in common
In all three cases, the thing you would be asking for does not exist yet. Nobody has the answer in their head waiting to be retrieved.
That is the test, and it is usually answerable in a few seconds:
Is this something somebody already knows, or something nobody knows yet?
If somebody already knows it, twenty minutes and then ask. If nobody knows it, the time is yours to spend, and spending it is what you are for.
The fourth case, which is real
The panel above drew only one of its four lines: four hours spent waiting for a colleague to return from leave, on the assumption that only they could answer.
That was being stuck, and the error was the assumption. "Only X can answer this" is almost always wrong in an organisation of any size, and it is worth testing with one sentence in a channel before it costs a day.
The timing exception
One more case where not asking is right: when you are about to ask something that will be answered by the meeting starting in ten minutes.
Wait for the meeting. This sounds obvious and new people routinely interrupt somebody at four minutes to the hour with a question that is on the agenda.
The honest difficulty
The distinction in this note is clear to state and hard to apply in the moment, because being stuck on a fact and being stuck on a problem feel identical from inside.
What helps is asking the question out loud, to yourself, as though somebody were going to answer it.
"Where is the staging password?" is a sentence somebody can answer.
"Why does the import produce two rows?" is a sentence nobody can answer without doing the work you are already doing.
That test takes four seconds and it is right most of the time. Where it is ambiguous, ask anyway: a question that turns out to be the work is answered with "that is what we are paying you to find out", which is said kindly in almost every organisation and costs you nothing.
The fourth category: not yet
Separate from the three above, and worth naming because it accounts for a good deal of unnecessary asking.
Some questions answer themselves in a week. What a term means, how a process works, why a meeting exists — many of these resolve simply by continuing to be present, and asking about every one of them in week one produces a quantity of explanation you will not retain.
The test is whether anything is blocked. A word you do not understand in a meeting about something you are not working on can wait; the same word in a specification you have to implement cannot.
Write it down either way. Most entries on a first-fortnight list are resolved by week three without anybody being asked anything.