The shop nobody has built before

A woman in Amman who makes hair clips asks a friend how long it would take to build her an online shop.

He gives the only honest answer, which is that it depends, and then he starts asking questions.

Has he built one like this before, or has anyone? Will she still want the same thing in three weeks, or is she likely to see another shop she prefers halfway through? Are the photographs ready, or is a cousin taking them when he has a free weekend? Who is writing the descriptions? Does she want it soon, or right, or cheap, because she will not get all three? And how involved does she want to be, given that every conversation tends to end in a new idea?

None of these questions is about the hard part of the work. That is the point. The time a job takes is mostly decided by what surrounds it.

A job carried out many times before, by people who have carried it out many times, moves quickly, because everyone is following a path somebody already found. Work that nobody quite knows how to do is slower, because the path has to be found first, and finding it is a different and longer kind of labour.

Every conversation along the way tends to change what is being built, and a changed plan is partly a new plan. Every person whose part has to arrive before the next step can start adds days nobody counted.

So the useful question is rarely how long it will take. It is how much of this is new, how much is likely to change, and who we are waiting on.