Alright, so people sometimes ask me about that “Doug Sheehan 2022” stuff. Yeah, I remember when that was making the rounds. Seemed like a whole lot of noise about not much, if I’m being honest. Another one of those flash-in-the-pan ideas, or so I thought at the time.
It’s funny how you stumble into things, though. I wasn’t looking for any new gurus or anything. I was completely swamped with this project, a real monster. The client was great, but the legacy system we were trying to patch up? Pure chaos. I was burning the midnight oil, mainlining coffee, and just generally feeling like I was hitting my head against a brick wall.
How I Even Got There
My usual methods just weren’t cutting it. I was stuck. Seriously stuck. So, one of those late nights, probably around 3 AM, I was just mindlessly scrolling through some old work forums, you know, the kind of places where people share obscure tips. Desperate, really. And someone, in a completely unrelated thread, just dropped a comment like, “Oh, that sounds a bit like Sheehan’s 2022 approach to workflow.” No link, no explanation, nothing.
Normally, I’d have just ignored it. But I was at that point where I’d try anything. So, I started digging. It wasn’t easy to find much concrete stuff. It wasn’t like there was a polished book or a fancy website. It was more like:
- A few scattered blog posts from people who’d supposedly heard him speak.
- Some really cryptic presentation slides, mostly graphics.
- A couple of forum discussions debating what he actually meant.
Basically, it felt like trying to piece together a puzzle with half the pieces missing. But the core idea I managed to glean was about radically simplifying how you approached tasks and, more importantly, how you handled information flow within a project. At least, that’s what I took from it.
So, I decided, “What have I got to lose?” I picked one tiny part of my nightmare project, a particularly tangled module, and tried to apply what I understood of Sheehan’s 2022 thinking. My first few attempts were a disaster. Seriously. I think I made it worse. I was trying to force these abstract ideas onto very concrete problems, and it just wasn’t clicking.
I spent a whole weekend just trying to get one small function to work using this “new” way. Lots of scribbling on notepads, lots of muttering to myself. My dog thought I’d lost it. But then, bit by bit, something started to shift. It wasn’t about following some rigid rules he’d laid out – because there weren’t many to find! It was more about the mindset. Thinking smaller. Thinking about connections in a different way.
It wasn’t a magic fix. The project was still tough. But that little experiment with the Sheehan “principles,” or whatever you want to call them, gave me a new angle. It helped me break down a couple of really stubborn problems into pieces I could actually manage. It was about stripping away all the fluff and just focusing on the absolute essential path from A to B.
So, yeah, that’s my experience with “Doug Sheehan 2022.” It wasn’t about becoming a disciple. It was about being desperate enough to try something weird I found on the internet, and actually getting a little bit of practical help from it when I needed it most. Some of it stuck with me, other parts I left behind. But it’s a good reminder that sometimes the useful stuff comes from unexpected places, especially when you’re really in a bind.
