Cheese and Pickle, No Onion: Briefing Lessons from the Friday Lunch Run

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a small office when someone says, "Just get me the usual." Everyone nods. Nobody asks a follow-up. And twenty-five minutes later, a plastic bag lands on a desk containing something the person in question will stare at with mild disappointment for the rest of the afternoon.

I know this because for about eighteen months I was the one carrying the bag.

The Friday List

It started as a favour. One person couldn't leave the phones, so I offered to walk to the sandwich shop at the end of the road. By week three there was a list on a Post-it. By month two, there was a spreadsheet. Not because I'm organised in any impressive way, but because the same argument kept happening: someone would order "the usual", someone else would order "surprise me", and both would end up annoyed.

What I didn't clock at the time was that I was running unpaid training in project scoping, three lunches a month.

"The Usual" Is Not a Brief

The worst offenders weren't the fussy ones. The fussy ones were a delight — they'd tell you the bread, the filling, the exact quantity of mayonnaise, and whether the tomato should be touching the cheese (it should not, apparently). Vague instructions are hard. Precise instructions, however tedious, are easy.

The problem was "the usual". Because "the usual" is not a description. It's a reference to something that happened before, and it only works if both people are picturing the same thing. Usually they're not. My colleague's "usual" was a chicken salad bap with no butter. Mine to interpret it was whatever I'd seen him eat most recently, which turned out to be a ham and mustard roll he'd pinched from a meeting.

He was polite about it. That's worse, in some ways. A complaint is information. Politeness just means the error travels quietly downstream.

I've since had client briefs that were the same thing wearing a jacket. "Can you do something like the last one but fresher?" "We want it to feel premium but not expensive." "Just make it pop." These aren't briefs. They're moods. And a mood can't be signed off.

"Surprise Me" Is a Scope-Creep Engine

Then there was the Friday I got braver. Someone said "surprise me", so I did. I came back with a salt beef bagel, pickles, the works — from the good place, the one with the queue, the one that cost nearly twice as much.

He ate it politely. Then he said, "I don't really do salt beef."

Of course he didn't. Nobody who says "surprise me" wants to be surprised. They want you to take the decision off their hands while landing squarely inside a set of expectations they haven't told you about. That is a very specific ask, and it is not the same as freedom.

Freelance work has a version of this too, and it's the one that eats your weekends. "You're the expert — do what you think's best." Six weeks later, three rounds of revisions and one slightly tense call later, you're both standing in a room wondering how a sentence so generous ended up costing everyone money.

What the List Actually Fixed

Somewhere around the fourth month, I started writing the orders down properly. Not "cheese sarnie" but "cheese and pickle, brown, no onion, cut in half". Not "whatever's nice" but "something with chicken, nothing with mayo, under a fiver". The change was immediate and slightly insulting: almost nobody minded being asked. Several people thanked me.

That's the bit I carry into freelance work now. The people who give you the fuzziest briefs are usually not being difficult. They simply haven't been asked a question that lets them be precise. Speed feels like politeness, so nobody wants to be the person who slows everything down by querying it.

But a brief that gets queried on day one costs fifteen minutes. A brief that gets interpreted on day one and questioned on day forty costs a fortnight and a bit of goodwill.

The Three Questions

I have a short ritual now before I agree to anything. It's not clever, and it fits on the back of a receipt, which is roughly the standard I apply to all my systems.

One: What does done look like?

Not what the project is — what the finished thing is. A document? A page that loads in under two seconds? Someone in a room saying yes? If neither of us can describe the endpoint in one sentence, we're not ready to start. We're just keen.

Two: Who signs this off?

This is the sandwich equivalent of asking whose order it actually is. It's astonishing how often the person sending the brief isn't the one who decides whether it's correct. Get the name. Ideally get the name in writing. If there are three people who can say "that's not right", you need to know that before you buy the bread.

Three: What would make you say 'that's not what I meant'?

This one does the heavy lifting. It invites the client to describe failure in advance, which is much easier than describing success. Nearly everyone has an answer ready. Sometimes it's genuinely useful — "it must match the old logo", "it can't mention the price", "no onion". And once you've heard it, you can stop guessing.

Nobody Argues About a Cheese Roll

Here's the thing the lunch run taught me that I keep coming back to. In eighteen months of Friday orders, we never once had a row about a cheese and pickle roll. Not once. Every single dispute — quiet or otherwise — came from something left unsaid at the point of ordering.

Freelance work behaves exactly the same way. Most of the pain isn't in the making. It's in the bit before the making, where two people who quite like each other quietly assume they're talking about the same sandwich.

So ask. Make a list. Look slightly pedantic for fifteen minutes. It's cheaper than the alternative, and the alternative always, always arrives cold.