Snow Shoveling Heuristics
I shoveled the driveway three times this weekend.
There’s something about repetitive physical work that frees up the mind to wander. Somewhere in there I found myself thinking about how the strategies for moving frozen water around by hand mirror the strategies we use to tackle problems at work.
Three Basic Moves
When you’re clearing snow without machinery, you have three options. The first is the manual snow-thrower: scoop and fling, scoop and fling. The second is the manual snow-plow: push the snow horizontally until it piles up at the edge. The third and most annoying is the manual pick-up-and-carry: lift a shovelful, walk it somewhere, dump it, walk back, repeat.
Of these, the snow-plow is the least back-breaking. The pick-up-and-carry is the most. Yet sometimes you need the painful option to enable the efficient ones.
Two Driveways, Two Approaches
At our old house, the driveway was absurdly wide. Too wide to simply plow from center to edge without the snow becoming an unmanageable wall halfway across. So I had to get creative about dividing the task.
My approach was to start with the worst method—pick-up-and-carry—to create pathways that divided the driveway into smaller sections. Once I had my grid of cleared paths, I could use the more efficient snow-throw and snow-plow techniques on each manageable chunk. The problem was that initial phase. Starting with the most obnoxious move made the entire exercise feel like punishment.
Then we moved to the woods. The new driveway is long and initially intimidating, but it’s narrow enough to divide naturally into left side and right side. Now I go down the middle using the snow-thrower to create a single path, then plow each half toward its respective edge. No pick-up-and-carry required. The whole project has become almost pleasant—predictable, rhythmic, even meditative.
Same task. Same tools. Different approach. Dramatically different experience.
Enter the Heuristic
I’m going to call these patterns—which moves to deploy, how to divide a given surface into workable sections—snow shoveling heuristics.
A heuristic is a mental shortcut or rule of thumb that helps us make quick, efficient decisions without having to reason from first principles every time. We use them constantly, often without noticing.
One of the most common heuristics in knowledge work is “break it down into smaller tasks.” It sounds almost uselessly obvious when stated that way. But the real skill isn’t knowing that you should decompose a problem—it’s knowing how to decompose it. Just as a wide driveway and a narrow driveway demand different division strategies, different types of problems call for different decomposition frameworks.
Here’s the thing: the framework you use to break down a problem often matters more than the effort you put into solving it. Use the wrong one and you’re doing pick-up-and-carry when you could be plowing.
Three Problems, Three Frameworks
Let’s look at how this applies to the kinds of problems we encounter in business.
Understanding a Business
When the problem is “make sense of this company,” the Spherical Cow framework provides natural fault lines. Every business, no matter how complex, can be simplified into six core functions: understanding economics, discovering what people want, building solutions, telling people about them, selling, and delivering.
This gives you six clear paths down the middle of the driveway. Instead of staring at an overwhelming organizational chart or endless process documentation, you can ask: “How does this company discover what customers want?” Then: “How do they build it?” Each question becomes its own manageable section.
Understanding a Market
When the problem is “figure out a market you’ve never operated in,” the challenge shifts. You’re not decomposing something you can already see—you’re mapping territory you’ve never visited.
In Exploring the Unknown, I proposed using functional landmarks as your starting points. Begin with economic fundamentals: who pays, for what, and why? Then identify patterns around customer needs, existing solutions, sales channels, and delivery mechanisms. You’re essentially creating paths through unfamiliar snow, building a grid you can then work within.
The key insight is that even in unfamiliar territory, certain landmarks are predictable. Every market has buyers and sellers, problems and solutions. Start there and fill in the blank map as you learn.
Understanding a Process
When the problem is “figure out how this work actually gets done,” you need a decomposition framework at the task level. The Role-Verb-Noun-Output pattern I introduced for thinking about AI workflows works equally well for understanding any process.
Who performs the action (Role)? What do they do (Verb)? To what (Noun)? What’s produced (Output)? When is it done (Done-when)?
This gives you a consistent way to break any process into its atomic units. Like dividing a driveway into sections small enough to plow efficiently, you’re creating pieces small enough to understand, question, or improve.
Choosing Your Framework
The meta-heuristic, the heuristic for choosing heuristics, is matching your decomposition strategy to the shape of your problem. A business is a system of functions. A market is a territory to map. A process is a sequence of task-level actions.
Use the wrong framework and you’ll find yourself doing the equivalent of pick-up-and-carry on a narrow driveway: working hard, making progress, but missing the more elegant path.
Billy Collins wrote a poem called “Shoveling Snow with Buddha” in which he and the Buddha clear a driveway together. Collins doesn’t mention what heuristic they used to divide the task. Perhaps the Buddha would say the framework doesn’t matter — only the shoveling itself.