Guard your time jealously, use most of it for high leverage work

Thu, 16 May 2024 00:07:42 +0000

As you become more senior in your career, demands on your time will outstrip the hours you’re willing to work, no matter what. Your time, focus, and energy is perhaps the most immovable constraint on your output. There is a very real ceiling on the useful output hours you get per week – while you can raise the raw quantity of hours easily enough, it almost certainly comes at a cost on quality short term and sustainable energy longer term. So instead of adding hours, focus on making a fixed set of hours really count.

It's imperative for you to be an active owner/director of what you spend your time working on. This includes what to set aside, as not all demands can be met. As you get more senior, you’ll increasingly need to be an active participant in helping your manager and team prioritize what is right for you.

Focus on identifying the top one to three big efforts you want to consume the bulk of your project time. You should be in the details of these things, as is appropriate for your level, of course. Utilize your calendar effectively to ensure your time allocation matches agreed priorities and be ruthless in prioritizing essential participation and eliminating unnecessary commitments.

If you need or want frameworks, you can try the Eisenhower Matrix or LNO, but recognize that all frameworks are useful only in as much as they actually work for you. At the end of the day you should be using whatever tools in the toolbox get the best outcomes for your working style.

Finally realize this is not a one time intervention, it’s an ongoing process. Check in with your manager every so often and confirm these are actually the most important problems. I find my own “top 3” tend to change roughly once per quarter. The single best predictor of my priorities needing a reassessment is feeling overwhelmed or like I'm working on the wrong projects. You should expect and plan for periodic reassessments of your time distribution as priorities shift.

Take a moment to identify your current top three priorities. Does your calendar reflect them? Are they still aligned with your biggest impact areas? Schedule a 15-minute review with yourself this week and consider bringing any findings to your manager to discuss.

If it isn’t scheduled, it won’t happen

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a pretty good run of writing something (internally, for Yelp) every week for a while now, averaging ~3 posts per month since August. These posts are usually focused on what I’ve been thinking about this past week, but I try to include a dedicated non-status-update section in each one. Writing these sections is the majority of my effort for each post and also the most common reason I fail to publish something — they’re hard!

When writing isn’t scheduled….

Lately I’ve noticed a bad pattern (including this last Friday) that goes something like this:

My week is a little crazy and I feel behind
I don’t write the weekly post until Friday
Friday morning quickly fills up with all the other things I’m behind on
The post either happens very late Friday, or I write it on the weekend, or it doesn’t happen at all that week

This isn’t occurring every week, but when I miss a post it’s nearly always due to this sequence of problems. I’ve given a talk at Pycon with a variety of ideas for not getting overloaded, and part of that strategy is to identify important work and prioritize it explicitly.

Parkinson’s Law and the value of explicitly blocked time

Parkinson’s Law says “work expands to fill the time available” and the only way I know to protect tasks against encroachment by other tasks is proactively setting aside of time.

I strongly encourage explicitly blocking time for the most important work you want to do, and scheduling it up front where you’re forced to work on it before anything else can claim your limited time. Leo Babauta advocates for thinking regularly on your most important tasks (MIT) and attacking it immediately and directly — another way to avoid unintentionally prioritizing the tiny “junk food” tasks that are easy to crank out but relatively unimportant.

For my writing, this means no “squeezing writing in after work” or “when I have free time on a Saturday”, but blocking dedicated time (1 hour a week for now, Thursday mornings) in my calendar. Inevitably I’m tired on a weeknight or I have competing life plans on a weekend (like spending quality dog park time with a certain puppy).

Applying it in practice

So I’m going to try setting aside time for writing less informally and more explicitly. Major changes:

Set aside 1 hour Thursday mornings
Check in another couple weeks and see if this is enough time or I need to adjust the duration. Maybe try one longer block and more, shorter blocks to see which works best.
Build a feedback loop of making sure every month or so that whatever setup I have is working (am I actually writing and publishing regularly?)

The goal is to also make a point of more regularly writing here in a public and visible way. I’ve often felt frustrated at the lack of technical leadership writing on the web — time to make sure mine is generally available at least.

Originally published at www.locallyoptimal.com on March 26, 2019.

Productivity on Locally Optimal

Guard your time jealously, use most of it for high leverage work

If it isn’t scheduled, it won’t happen

When writing isn’t scheduled….

Parkinson’s Law and the value of explicitly blocked time

Applying it in practice