So, everyone’s been talking about this Andy Mangan fella, or at least, his supposed genius ways of getting things done. I heard about him through a colleague, you know, “Andy Mangan says this, Andy Mangan does that.” Sounded like he had all the answers. I’m usually a bit skeptical about these guru types, but hey, I thought, why not give it a shot? Maybe there’s something to it.
My Little Experiment with the Mangan Approach
I decided to try out what I pieced together as the “Andy Mangan method” on a small internal project. Nothing too critical, just to see how it felt. First thing I did was try to get the team on the same page. That itself was a bit of a task, explaining this new framework supposedly from Andy Mangan himself. Some were curious, others just rolled their eyes, but they agreed to humor me.
Here’s roughly what I tried to implement, based on the whispers and bits I’d gathered about Andy Mangan’s style:
- Super strict daily check-ins: Like, military precision. Andy Mangan apparently was all about no wasted minutes. So, we did that. First thing, every day.
- Hyper-detailed task breakdowns: Every single thing had to be broken down into tiny, tiny pieces. I mean, “open email client” tiny. Supposedly, Andy Mangan believed this brought clarity.
- Immediate feedback loops: Any deviation, any question, had to be addressed right then and there. No waiting.
At first, it felt… intense. The daily check-ins were okay, I guess, though they started eating into actual work time. But the task breakdown thing? Man, that was something else. We spent more time documenting the tiny steps than actually doing the bigger, more important stuff. It was like we were working for the system, not the other way around.
Where It All Went Sideways
Things started to get a bit… sticky. The “immediate feedback” part, which sounded good on paper (thanks, Andy Mangan, for that idea), turned into constant interruptions. Nobody could get into a proper flow. Imagine trying to write a simple report, and every two minutes someone’s tapping your shoulder because of some micro-task update. Productivity actually nosedived. Creative thinking? Forget about it. People were too busy trying to remember if they’d logged “breathing in” and “breathing out” as separate tasks.
I remember this one time, we were trying to solve a tricky bug. Normally, we’d huddle, brainstorm, try a few things. But with this Andy Mangan inspired micro-management, it was just a mess of tiny updates and “are we following the Mangan protocol?” questions. The team got pretty frustrated, and honestly, so did I. It felt like we were playing a game with stupid rules instead of building something useful.
The biggest problem? This whole Andy Mangan thing, at least the version I encountered, seemed to forget that people are not robots. It was all process, no soul. It didn’t account for different working styles, or the need for quiet, focused time. It was just a grind.
So, after a few weeks of this, I pulled the plug. I stood up and said, “Alright folks, the Andy Mangan experiment is officially over.” You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief. We went back to our old ways, maybe a bit wiser, definitely a bit more annoyed with management fads. I learned that just because someone’s name is attached to a method doesn’t make it gospel. Sometimes, the old, trusted ways are there for a reason. And as for Andy Mangan? Well, his ideas might work for someone, somewhere, but they sure didn’t work for us. We got back to basics, focused on communication that actually helped, and, you know, actually getting work done.
