Wash the grapes

Prep work is part of procuring

Perhaps you’ve noticed this same phenomenon I have in my house: If I buy grapes at the supermarket, then wash them and put them in a bowl on the counter, they get eaten.

If I just put them in the fridge fruit drawer? They might stay there, and sometimes wind up spoiled before anyone eats them.

On some level, this doesn’t make sense. We’re talking about the same grapes. It doesn’t take much time to pull a handful of grapes out of the drawer and wash them. But somehow these extra steps become barriers to enjoying the grapes, just as a whole carrot seems much more intimidating to wash, peel, and slice vs. grabbing a baby carrot.

Build in prep time

So, knowing this, it’s better to commit to doing just a little bit of prep work up front so you can enjoy things. Indeed, it’s best to just build the required prep time into your mental model of how long things take. Buying produce means procuring it and washing it or chopping it (or buying it pre-chopped — you haven’t saved money buying a whole cantaloupe if it then goes bad in your fridge!).

When you get new pants that need to be altered, taking them to the tailor is part of the shopping experience. Really, there’s never going to be a better time to do this than right after you get the pants. Once they sit in the closet for a while they’ll become part of the scenery — and they might be out of style before you manage to make them wearable.

Training is part of hiring

There are even professional applications of this concept. In my conversations with various organizations, I’ve found that many know that their new employee onboarding process is terrible. People have heavy workloads, so they hire new staff. But once the new people show up at work, the workload still feels too heavy to spend time training them. The new hires get an employee handbook and a meeting with HR…and everyone still feels overwhelmed.

Better to wash the grapes. That is, actually plan out new employees’ first few days, with every hour given an objective. Hiring them means doing that, not just making an offer. That makes it more likely that everyone gets the value they were seeking in the first place.