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Archives for December 2009

Take Note of the Time You Save

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I think it frequently happens that when we do something that saves time, we fail to appreciate the savings we’ve just gained. Instead, we just go onto the next thing, continuing to feel like there is less time in the day for all that we have to do.

I just decided not to do a certain household project which would be good to complete, but would take about 4 hours. It has to do with fixing a mistake the original builders made, but we’ve decided just to let it be.

Now, I could go on to the next thing on my list (which is long today). Or, I could just quit for the day (it’s Saturday, and I’m taking care of some household stuff) and say to myself: “If I had made the bad decision to fix that thing, I would have had 4 hours taken away from other stuff anyway. Why not, now, still take that 4 hours away from my work, but instead do something I want to do — like go do something fun with my kids.”

I’m not going to do that in this instance, because this afternoon is devoted for getting some of these hanging projects knocked off. But, that would be a good option sometimes. In this instance, what I should do is be glad I’ve saved some time, and now start feeling ahead of the game for the rest of the day.

What's Not Best: Hospital Billing

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We’ve been getting the bills now from when we had our third baby a month ago. The “nursery” charge alone was $2,000. He was in the hospital nursery for a total of about 20 minutes.

Grateful for health insurance — but of course that is also one of the reasons that such exorbitant bills exist.

Why the Statement "Nobody Says on their Deathbed I Wish I Had Spent More Time at the Office" is Almost Meaningless

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The statement is almost meaningless because it only deals with the “what” when the real problem is the “how.” You can have the “what” right (“I want to spend less time working”) but still fail at doing it because good intentions frequently run aground upon the absence of a realistic “how.”

Maybe I’m being too generous here, but it seems to me that most people who spend too much time at the office probably don’t do so because they want to (i.e., their priorities are screwed up), but because they don’t know how to do otherwise (i.e., they don’t know how to execute on their priorities). If they were to suddenly start working less, for example, the result would simply be that the work would build up — thereby distracting them, nagging them, and clogging things up so that their entire life becomes more difficult, not less.

In other words, spending less on time on work is not without consequence. It’s not something you can just do — regardless of intentions. Systems and know-how trump intentions. Just because someone toward the end of their life says “I wish I had spent less time at the office,” it doesn’t mean that they could have. The statement ends up making people feel guilty for wrong priorities when the real problem is often lack of knowledge about how to execute on those priorities.

Further, the statement also fails to acknowledge (“no one says…“) that some people should spend a ton of time working and all people rightly and properly tend to have seasons like this. (Yes, I affirm this in spite of my post yesterday that “you don’t have to be busy” — there are different types of busyness, and doing a smaller number of things sometimes still requires lots of time working if the nature of those things requires it.)

The apostle Paul is a good example of someone who often worked “night and day” (1 Thess 2:9) and labored extremely hard over the course of his life. I don’t think that Paul said at the end of his life “I wish I had spent less time laboring for the gospel.” He might have said “I wish I could have spent less time making tents to fund my ministry,” but his preference with that time would probably have been to devote it to his ministry. In part (this is an important side lesson), the reason that it worked for Paul to be so devoted to the work of his ministry is that he crafted his other responsibilities in a way that made this possible (for example, he remained single).

To be sure, I’m not saying the statement is bad. And neither am I getting into the really interesting new reality that doing work does not always have to equal “being in the office” anymore — which really has the potential to change things up. I don’t want to sound like I’m trashing the intention of this statement.

My point here is simply that we need to be people who do more than simply say things like “no one at the end of their life wishes they had spent more time at the office.” That’s not helpful because it doesn’t acknowledge that it requires skill to actually accomplish the “task” of working less and spending more time with family. We need to be people who give the “how,” not just the “what.”

You Don’t Have to be Busy

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Productivity is not first about getting a lot of things done, but about getting the right things done.

If you are getting the right things done, you don’t necessarily have to be doing a large number of things.

In other words, you don’t have to be busy in order to be effective.

So don’t measure your effectiveness by how much you are able to do, but rather by what you do.

And, ironically, if you focus on the quantity of things you do, you will most likely fail to identify and execute on the things that are most important — that is, on the right things.

Beware of Momentum Killers

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Momentum is one of the keys to accomplishing your priorities. If you always have to start and stop, not only will things take longer, but you might get thrown out of the mental state that is required for various complex and high-level tasks that you need to accomplish.

The result is that a one hour divergence can actually destroy four hours of productivity (or more).

The most well known (but certainly not only) momentum killer is email. The thing about email is that you never know what you are going to get. You could have had your email clear at 10:00 am, but then at 1:00 some complex emails come in that present a series of tasks that may take an hour to complete. Simply knowing about this can be distracting, but more than that it can be tempting to diverge from your course to accomplish the more important task.

So let’s say you have the afternoon blocked off for a large and complex task. But when you get back from lunch you decide to check email before digging in — and the above scenario happens. A series of complicated emails comes in that require about an hour to complete.

Because you now know about these tasks, your mind starts going down that road a bit. You find this distracting. So you say to yourself, “it sure would be nice to get my email all clear again before heading into this big and complicated project I need to work on.” Then you move ahead on getting those emails and the tasks they contain out of the way.

At the end of this hour, more emails have come in — in part because people are responding back to you from some other smaller emails that you also decided to get out of the way — and you are now on a completely different course.

Now, this is not bad in itself. Email is not the enemy, and there are many instances when it is useful and productive to follow your email for a period of time. The issue here, though, is that you have a different, non-email, high priority task that you need to accomplish. And email derailed you from it.

The real problem, though, is worse: Email didn’t simply cost you the 1-2 hours that you spent away from this high priority task. For by the time you have your email wrapped up again where you want, it’s 3:00 in the afternoon. Half the afternoon is gone. Further, your momentum has been going towards email for the last two hours, making it hard to shift gears into this complex task.

As a result, you are “out of the mindset” needed to generate the focus you need to make progress on the task. So even though you have two hours left before you planned to head home, you cannot use that two hours for the original task you had planned. You’ve lost your momentum. Two hours on email destroyed four hours of productivity on your more important task.

And, it gets even worse. Because, unfortunately, the following day is all booked, you have some other things you need to get done in the middle of the week and, of course, more email will be coming in over that time as well. So it looks like it will be a few days before you can get back to this task. And even then, it is going to be a fight to make it happen.

This is how the loss of momentum makes important things take forever and makes us less satisfied with our days. There is no perfect solution here, but it can make a huge difference to pause and reflect before taking a “small and temporary detour” in a different direction.

By being aware of the potential consequences of losing momentum, we can become more disciplined at putting first things first, and letting other things be crowded out rather than those first things.

The One Skill Necessary for Thriving in a World of Excess Access

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In his book The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, Marcus Buckingham has a great section on how the most fundamental and critical skill necessary to thriving in this new world of “excess access” is focus. This reality, in turn, has the surprising implication that we should not seek balance, but rather should seek intentional unbalance.

Here’s what he has to say (from pages 25-26):

We live in a world of excess access. We can find whatever we want, whenever we want it, as soon as we want it. This can be wonderfully helpful if we are trying to track down last month’s sales data, an errant bank statement, or a misplaced mother-in-law, but if we are not quite careful, this instant, constant access can overwhelm us.

To thrive in this world will require of us a new skill. Not drive, not sheer intelligence, not creativity, but focus [emphasis added]. The word “focus” has two primary meanings. It can refer either to your ability to sort through many factors and identify those that are most critical — to be able to focus well is to be able to filter well. Or it can refer to your ability to bring sustained pressure to bear once you’ve identified these factors — this is the laser-like quality of focus.

Today you must excel at filtering the world. You must be able to cut through the clutter and zero in on the emotions or facts or events that really matter. You must learn to distinguish between what is merely important and what is imperative. You must learn to place less value on all that you can remember and more on those few things that you must never forget.

This “filtering” component of focus is critical if we are going to avoid drowning in our world of “excess access” and are going to be able to truly benefit from the abundance of access that we have. It allows us to identify what is most important among everything out there.

That is critical all on its own. But its when we come to the second dimension of focus — laser-like precision — that we come to the big implication of these things. Buckingham continues:

But you must also learn the discipline of applying yourself with laser-like precision. As we will see, … [effectiveness] does not come to those who aspire to well-roundedness, breadth, and balance. The reverse is true. Success comes most readily to those who reject balance, who instead pursue strategies that are intentionally imbalanced.

This focus, this willingness to apply disproportionate pressure in a few selected areas of your working life, won’t leave you brittle and narrow. Counterintuitively, this kind of lopsided focus actually increases your capacity and fuels your resilience.

That is exactly right. The world of “excess access” means not only that there is an over-abundance of information and detail to sort through. It also means that there is an over-abundance of choices we have to make in regard to where to spend our time and how to focus our efforts. How do we make this choice?

We make it on the basis of our strengths. Seek to build your life around what you are good at and are energized by, and apply yourself with laser-like precision to those things. The more you can stay on this path, the more effective you will be.

Because none of us are strong in everything, this of necessity means that we must give up pursuing the myth of balance and instead pursue strategic imbalance. We should be “imbalanced” in that the things we choose to do should disproportionately come from areas of our strengths. But this is strategic — not haphazard — because we do this intentionally because we know that we will be most effective when operating in the realm of our strengths rather than our weaknesses.

This leads to two practical questions and applications:

  1. What things do you do best and find most energizing? Seek to craft your role (and your personal life) in a way that will enable you to do more of those things.
  2. Which things do you find depleting — even if you are good at them? Seek to carve those out of your role, or if you can’t do that, find ways to tweak how you do them so that they can be done in a way that calls upon your strengths more fully.