PYFFO: An Idea Nearly a Decade in the Making
Some software projects start with a requirements document.
Some start because a customer has a problem that needs solving.
And occasionally, one starts with a slightly inappropriate acronym that refuses to go away.
Meet PYFFO™.
Pronounced FIH-foh, and these days officially meaning:
Pull Your Freaking Finger Out.
I’ll leave you to work out what the original version said.
This isn’t actually new
I’ve been interested in productivity for a very long time.
Not productivity in the wake up at 4am, meditate for seventeen minutes and optimise your breakfast sense.
I’m interested in getting things done.
Years ago, that interest became The PYFFO Principle, a small guide I wrote about procrastination and some of the techniques I’d found useful for overcoming it.
The principles weren’t particularly revolutionary.
Make a list.
Give things deadlines.
Eat the frog.
Break the elephant into smaller bites.
Work in short focused bursts.
Stop letting perfection become an excuse for not finishing.
Simple stuff.
But it worked for me.
The central idea was even simpler:
Stop staring at the thing you need to do and start doing it.
Or, more succinctly…
PYFFO.
Then something changed
Over the years my thinking about productivity evolved.
I still believe procrastination is a problem.
But I started noticing something else.
Sometimes the reason we’re struggling to get something done isn’t because we’re lazy, distracted or badly organised.
Sometimes the process is just crap.
You enter the customer’s details into one system.
Then somebody enters them again into another.
Every Friday someone exports data into Excel, rearranges it and emails exactly the same report they created last Friday.
A spreadsheet exists because two applications don’t talk to each other.
An approval sits waiting for somebody who probably didn’t need to approve it in the first place.
Someone spends half an hour looking for information everyone knows exists… somewhere.
And eventually all of this becomes normal.
“That’s just how we do it.”
That’s when my fascination with productivity became a fascination with friction.
There has to be an easier way
Looking back, removing friction is actually what I’ve spent most of my software career doing.
A customer shows me a complicated process and invariably the question rattling around in my head is:
Why are you doing it like that?
Sometimes the answer is better software.
Sometimes it’s integration.
Sometimes it’s automation.
Sometimes it’s changing the process.
And occasionally the answer is gloriously simple:
Stop doing it.
Technology shouldn’t create work.
It should remove it.
That became the missing piece of PYFFO.
The original idea was about getting yourself moving.
The new idea asks another question:
What’s making progress harder than it needs to be?
So I dusted PYFFO off
What started as a conversation about resurrecting an old productivity idea quickly became something much bigger.
I didn’t want another training course.
The world isn’t suffering from a shortage of productivity courses.
I wanted a tool.
Something that could help an individual or business identify friction, quantify it, decide what should happen next and then measure whether fixing it actually made a difference.
That led to what is now The PYFFO Method:
Capture → Challenge → Simplify → Remove Friction → Accelerate → Finish
Capture what’s getting in the way.
Challenge whether it needs to exist.
Simplify it.
Remove the unnecessary friction.
Use technology, automation or AI where they genuinely help.
Then finish the bloody thing.
Making friction visible
This is where PYFFO became interesting to me as a software product.
Imagine discovering that a seemingly harmless manual process consumes 20 hours every month.
That’s 240 hours a year.
Fix it and those hours don’t magically turn into cash in the bank, but you’ve returned 240 hours of capacity to the business.
Now multiply that across duplicate entry, manual reporting, searching, approvals, disconnected applications and all the other little inefficiencies businesses accumulate.
Suddenly friction isn’t just annoying.
It’s measurable.
And if we can measure it before making a change, we can measure it afterwards.
That’s important.
I don’t want PYFFO telling somebody:
“Congratulations! Your productivity score is now 87%!”
What does that even mean?
I’d much rather it say:
61 hours/month of friction identified.
Then, a few months later:
42 hours/month recovered.
That’s a number a business owner can understand.
Then came the edge cases
This is where building the prototype became particularly entertaining.
What happens when two people independently identify the same problem?
We can’t count those wasted hours twice.
What happens when something gets fixed, verified and then six months later the problem comes back?
We can’t keep claiming the recovered capacity as though nothing happened.
What happens when three departments experience the same underlying problem differently?
What does “high effort” actually mean?
How confident are we in an estimate?
When should something be fixed now, investigated later or simply left alone?
Every one of these questions forced us to make the methodology more rigorous.
One rule eventually became particularly important:
A real-world unit of friction or recovery can contribute to the company total exactly once.
Multiple people identifying the same problem makes the evidence stronger.
It doesn’t magically make the problem bigger.
That sounds obvious.
Software has an extraordinary ability to make obvious things surprisingly complicated.
Three different PYFFOs
Another decision was how the product should be sold.
Subscriptions would have been the obvious route.
So naturally, I decided not to do that.
It seemed somewhat hypocritical to build a product dedicated to removing friction and then introduce another monthly subscription into everyone’s life.
Instead there will be three versions.
PYFFO Family
For individuals and families who want to remove friction from everyday life.
The jobs you’ve been avoiding.
Household administration.
Subscriptions.
Paperwork.
Digital clutter.
The recurring thing everyone hates doing.
$99. One-off purchase.
PYFFO Business
For a single company.
Find where time and effort are disappearing, determine what should be fixed first and measure the improvement.
$999. One-off purchase.
PYFFO Advisor
For accountants, consultants, advisors and business owners working across multiple companies.
Same methodology, but designed to manage audits across multiple organisations.
$1,999. One-off purchase.
No subscription.
No PYFFO account.
No central database containing all the interesting things you’ve just told PYFFO about what’s wrong with your business.
The data stays with you.
Because frankly, I don’t need it and I don’t want it.
Even the brand came back to friction
The original PYFFO branding was very different.
This time I’ve deliberately kept it simple.
PYFFO.
That’s it.
A clean wordmark, charcoal, with an orange full stop.
The full stop has grown on me enormously.
Find the problem.
Fix it.
Finish it.
Full stop.
Even the public expansion has received a slight polish over the years.
Pull Your Freaking Finger Out.
Apparently I’ve become respectable.
Who knew?
Where we’re at
The MAUI prototype is now taking shape across phones and tablets.
The website is being built.
The scoring model exists.
The question library is developing into what I suspect will become one of the most valuable parts of the product.
The recommendation engine is taking shape.
The branding is locked.
The commercial model is defined.
And I’m preparing to trademark PYFFO™.
What started years ago as a little guide about procrastination is turning into something I couldn’t have properly described when I first wrote it.
And strangely, it still comes back to exactly the same idea.
Stop procrastinating. Remove friction. Make progress.
Sometimes you need a better process.
Sometimes you need automation.
Sometimes you need different software.
Sometimes you need to stop doing something altogether.
And sometimes…
You just need to Pull Your Freaking Finger Out.