Standing rules beat strong opinions

Most people defend their work with opinions. I think it should be like this. I feel this is the right call. The opinion is right today. Tomorrow it's right again, slightly differently. By next week the product has fifty versions of right living in it.

The version of you holding the opinion is not the version applying it. The opinion that's clear at 11am Monday is the same opinion you'll second-guess at 11pm Tuesday when the deadline is closing.

A standing rule removes the second guess.

In one of my products, the rule is: gold appears only on financial values 24px or larger. Six words. No interpretation. Either an element qualifies or it doesn't.

I started with the opinion: gold should signal monetary weight. Lovely sentence. Useless on a Tuesday at 11pm. Three months in I had three different gold treatments living in the same product because the opinion got applied differently each time.

The opinion didn't fail. The act of re-deriving the rule from the opinion fifty times in a row failed.

What makes a standing rule actually work:

It is small enough to fit in your head. Gold only on 24px+ financial values. Not use gold sparingly to convey importance.

It is observable in under a second. You can look at a screen and know.

It is falsifiable by something other than your judgment. A linter. A test. A teammate who can call it. If it lives only in a doc, it lives only in the doc.

People resist standing rules because rules feel like surrender. I should be able to hold this in my head. You can. Until you can't. Until the product needs it more than your judgment can provide it.

Here's the move that took me years to learn: write down the rule when the decision is fresh and you're not under pressure. Then let the rule beat your in-the-moment opinion every time they disagree.

Most quality problems are not taste problems. They are consistency under pressure problems. The rule is the cheapest fix for that.

Discipline is what's left when willpower has gone home.