The Breakfast Sandwich Problem

Unfortunately, sandwich recipe is not included

I’ve written before about how I grew up inside of a Dunkin’ Donuts. While much has been written about how service industry jobs are great for learning many skills, I often reference one in particular. After talking about it three times this week, in addition to the roughly eleventy million times I’ve talked about it before, I knew I could not let any more time go by without talking about The Breakfast Sandwich Problem.

Whether making a breakfast sandwich at Dunkin Donuts or in your own home, you will often have the same problem, but it’s easier to show than tell. I think it’s best illustrated by thinking about how a 7-year-old child might make a breakfast sandwich.

If you ask 7-year-old Liz to make you a breakfast sandwich, you’ll probably find that she’ll get the bread, cut it in half, and then pop it in the toaster. Then she’ll get the rest of the ingredients. 

Then, you’ll probably see her prep the eggs, bacon, and cheese. If you can see where I’m going, you’ll notice that the bread will be done before the bacon is even in the pan. When all the ingredients are ready, the toasted bread is cold and never melts the cheese. 

Hence, The Breakfast Sandwich Problem. 

Don’t believe me? I saw this all the time working at Dunkin’. Someone ordered an Egg & Cheese on a Toasted Croissant. The correct steps were:

¹

 

• Put egg in the oven

• Cut the croissant and put it in a toaster

• Take the croissant out of the toaster, add cheese to the top half

• Put an egg on a croissant

• Stack sandwich and wrap

When you don’t make many breakfast sandwiches, people inevitably don’t get that in the wrong order. To execute making a breakfast sandwich well, you need to know your end state, all the ingredients you have, and what needs to happen to have the final product together. 

Just like planning a breakfast sandwich, things don’t just happen. You need to anticipate how long each of the different pieces or steps in a project will take, and you have to plan for them all.

Doing the work means planning the work.

While I don’t expect seven-year-old Liz to write out the steps to make her breakfast sandwich, it’s worth spending a couple of minutes before diving into the problem to consider it. 

Too often, folks, especially early-career folks, jump into a task without figuring out precisely what they need to do. 

A couple of things to consider:

• Are you making one sandwich or many? If many, do many people expect to eat at once?

• What cooking resources do you have available to you? Do you have an oven, and a toaster, and a frying pan? How many slots are there in the toaster? 

• What is your comfort in the kitchen? Are you comfortable managing multiple pans on the stove at the same time?

The way we approach problems at work and in our personal lives directly reflects the context and experiences we already have. If you’ve never cooked for only one person before or, oppositely, if you’ve only ever cooked for one person before, being thrust into the opposite situation can be complicated and confusing. Taking patterns that work in a specific context and trying to apply them to another one will set you up for something better than failure but certainly not success. 

Whether you’re planning a dinner party for fifteen or making a breakfast sandwich for one, everyone wants to eat a hot meal, and that starts with planning for all the things that have to happen in the correct sequence of events in the proper intervals of time. 

Starting with the end in mind… to back into the plan

While this phrase is cliched, there is no other way to feed people. “We need dinner for four humans at 5:45 PM” means:

• We need to have dinner cooking by 5:25 PM (if you’re really fast and efficient)

• We need to know what we’re cooking before that

• We need to have the ingredients for what we’re cooking

Put differently: it means we need to have a plan. 

At work, people are incredibly good at saying what the end result of something should be:

• We’ll have launched a complete redesign of the marketing site.

• We’ll have integrated GPT-4 into our app.

• We’ll have ten new users by the end of the week.

Between the idea [played around with ChatGPT] and the end state [integrated GPT-4], the messy middle derails projects. Unfortunately, it’s also hard to know what every step of a project will be. That’s why people start by toasting the bread. Doing something is better than nothing! they say. And, I know this will have to happen, so I’m just going to do it. 

Instead, spending time sketching out even just some of the following steps without doing all of them will put you in a better position than saying, “We should integrate with GPT-4 … GPT-4 has been integrated,” with no one knowing what that … in between is. 

Sometimes, settle for cold bread.

I’ve had a project that I’ve been putting off for four weeks that I finished yesterday. I had never done it before, and it was new and scary. It’d come to the top of my to-do list multiple times, but I’d let other things take priority over it, largely because I was putting it off. I didn’t even know if this was a complex task. I’d just never done it before, and the … between knowing what I had to do and getting it done was getting to be a bigger and bigger deal in my head every day.  

On the other side of this task hanging over me for WEEKS, I’m happy to say it took less than 2 hours total, and I am an absolute idiot for putting it off this long. 

What finally gave me the traction I needed to get this task done was that I settled for cold bread: I saw a job that needed to be done [bread needs to be toasted] and made it happen, rtather than think through optimal strategies or all the steps. I was dealing with a project I had never worked on before where I didn’t know all the steps that needed to happen. But I just did the first thing that I knew needed to be done: toast bread. Then I got the ingredients. Slowly but surely, I put the pieces together to where we had an MVP live. 

A cold breakfast sandwich today is better than no sandwich at all (or maybe a breakfast sandwich next week).

1. You know, it’s been more than a decade so this is not at all indicative of current procedures or maybe it is. I don’t know. I haven’t worked there since 2011ish.