Focus on Others’ Minutiae

Yes, this is the opposite of the typical time management advice. The usual approach is to determine your goals, identify the tasks you need to complete to accomplish the most important ones, and give those tasks top priority. Suggestions include doing the big rocks first, and and identifying what's important as opposed to what's urgent. The conventional advice, then, is to focus on your goals, and do what’s important. My advice is to do the opposite – focus on others, and don’t prioritize what’s “important”.

Here’s an example. You get to work in the morning and are informed the deadline for an important report has been moved up and it must be done in time for a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. You estimate it will take 8 hours to complete. You also have emails from three coworkers requesting information, and each response will take 10 minutes to complete. Conventional wisdom would have you work on your report and push back the response to the coworkers (if you’re nice, you’ll let them know you can’t get to it today). My advice is to respond to the coworkers. Here’s why:

• You have four things to do. Your brain has a lot of trouble distinguishing between accomplishing something big and something small; all achievements register roughly the same in your brain regardless of their magnitude. If you do the three small items, your brain will feel like it’s accomplished 75% of what you needed to do today in the first half hour. You will be happier and more productive, offsetting the time you “lost” responding to your colleagues.
• If you do the report first, the fact that you have three more things to do will weigh on your mind at some level, making you less productive. Better to clear your mind and rid yourself of other tasks you can accomplish quickly so you can fully focus on the big one.
• Your coworkers may be waiting for your response to complete their own urgent projects. Everyone's productivity goes up when bottlenecks are eliminated, and the best way to do that is to give priority to other’s needs.
• The total 1/2 hour you need to respond to your coworkers represents a little over 6% of the time you need to complete the report. Work tends to expand to fill the time available, and it’s not hard to squeeze 6% out of the total time needed to complete the project.
• If you put your coworkers off, they will probably be thinking to themselves, “He only needs to spend 10 minutes on this, is everything he has to do today so important he can’t spend 10 minutes on my request?” This situation gets really ugly if your coworker catches you taking a break from your report (and you will, or should, take some breaks – no one can work productively on a single project 8 hours straight).

Of course, if you find yourself never getting to your own projects there’s an overload problem (to be discussed in another post). There are times when you shouldn’t follow this guideline (for example, see my post Do What You Dread). However, when I focus on responding to others I’m both happier and more productive, and so are the people around me.