If you want the time to do good stuff, stop doing stuff you’ll never do well.
Partly attitude and partly system, here’s a plan for doing good stuff:
Push back
Don’t just say Yes every time something crosses your mind, your desk or your In-box. Giving yourself an easy time when accepting requests (especially from yourself) guarantees a hard and frustrating time under a big ticking clock as you try to deliver.
Avoid arm length to-do lists, missed deadlines and low quality by being honest about schedules, commitments and priorities.
Prioritise your list
I remember an executive saying, seemingly without irony, he had seven number one priorities, (no surprise at the end of the year then). Rank everything that you put on your list.
This is important for skippiness! — If you’re working for others or in a team, prioritising is team-work.
Finish what you start
This can mean getting to the finish line (yay!) but sometimes it means stopping what you started before the end because you (and your team) realise it’s a waste of time or it’s just not coming together.
It’s often a close call; there’s a fine line between pushing through adversity and bloody mindedness. Seth Godin wrote a whole (little) book, The Dip, on deciding if or when to quit. There’s a Change This version here.
What about you?
How do you make sure you’re working on the good stuff? How do you push back and help out at the same time?
In the last five years I’ve run well over 6000 miles in marathon training. Over that period I’ve been completely sidelined with injuries for over 30 weeks and have run with niggling problems for maybe a third of the time.
There are two things I should point out about that last paragraph: motivation is not a problem, I run every day it’s remotely possible; and, these kind of stats are not unusual for a marathon runner.
Over those five years I’ve used 16 pairs of running shoes and a set of specially made orthotic insoles. Without going in to the glorious marketing-speak of individual running shoe models it’s a fair assumption that my equipment choices have made running easier and less stressful on my body. Right? Or, without all those shoes I’d be injured even more. Right?
Maybe not.
Over the summer I read Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run, which promotes the idea that humans have evolved to run, and running shoes aren’t good for us. Apparently:
“there’s no evidence that running shoes are any help at all in injury prevention. In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies — not one — that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.”
My assumption: I need running shoes. The reality: I don’t need running shoes.
Everything I thought I knew is wrong.
What assumptions do you have, impacting your organisational life every day, that stand on no evidence?
The Science of Motivation
Here’s a possible example. In his recent TED Talk on the Surprising Science of Motivation Dan Pink highlighted the ineffectiveness of extrinsic motivators, such as bonuses, most of the time. Despite much of this research being 50 years old, many (most?) managers still rely on the wrong headed ideas of how to get things done.
The key lesson:
“There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does […] If we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks we can strengthen our businesses […] and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world.”
What to do when everything you know is wrong
So much for running shoes and extrinsic motivators. What do you do when something comes along that challenges your assumptions? Instinct may be to turn away and go back to the devil you know. Try this instead:
Stop – just think about it for a moment, is it even remotely possible that what has always seemed true, is maybe not the whole truth? Does this new thing nudge up against problem that just seems a part of the woodwork? Be open to possibility.
Look – dig into the the data. Strip away all the personality of the issue, what does the cold steel of a few facts show you?
Listen – who else is talking about this? Can you trust them? Ignore the doomsayers, trolls, the collapsoconomists and anyone with a vested interest in the status quo. Somebody, somewhere is looking at the edges of this thing. Find them.
Listen again – this time to your gut.
If you do all this and the world looks different … act.
My running world looks different. I’ve ditched the shoes for now. I’m not running marathons barefoot yet (although some people do) and I’ve had to make friends with a my blisters, but I am running again. And funnily enough … I feel stronger.
I have a Jura coffee machine at home. I bought it because I love coffee and the Jura is a fantastic machine that makes GREAT coffee that is consistently, wonderfully, perfect.
When I turn the Jura on, it goes through a little routine that heats the water and cleans things out. It takes about 45 seconds. And then, it is … ready. I don’t have to guess. I didn’t have to read the manual to discover that readiness follows the heating-rinsing routine. The machine tells me. The little LED display goes from Heating, to Rinsing, to Ready.
And every morning I think – as I press the button and breathe deep – wouldn’t it be lovely if everything was so well behaved, and told you when it was ready for action. The idea, the plan, the presentation, the product, the team, the soufflé.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
At its simplest, life comes down to a series of choices, or more often, a parallel of choices.
After deciding which new market or new product to go for, two types of choice dominate the day to day: how should we prioritise our time? and, should we go with option A or option B (or C, D, E, or F)?
This is no time to sway back and forth. You have to make decisions.
How do you decide what to do?
As I was looking in to this I came across a speech given by YCombinator founder Paul Graham at the StartupSchool2008 conference last year, he dealt specifically with the “how do you decide” question. His answer?
Do whatever is best for your users. You can hold on to that like a rope in a hurricane and it will save you if anything can. You can pull on that rope and it will guide you through everything you have to do. Figure out what they want, make them happy doing more of that.
Is he right? Absoloodle! Any choices that are best for customers tend to be pretty good for getting customers too. And customers make everything else possible.
If I could though, I’d add “in the long term” to the end of Mr Graham’s sentence. Running any kind of sustainable business, especially one that skips, is about winning in the long term. So doing whatever in the long term is best for your customers feels better to me.
Whether you’re prioritising time or choosing a fork in the road, put the customer front and centre, think long term, and swallow the results.
