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.

Do What You Dread

Getting Things Done is a great system, but it’s not always clear what your priorities should be. I had an experience when I was 12 years old which has helped me set priorities ever since.

I grew up on a small farm in eastern South Dakota near Lake Campbell. One cold, windy spring day I was fooling around by the lake and I spotted an old tire someone had discarded on the ice about 20 feet out from the shore. This tire really bugged me; it was right around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and my environmental consciousness was running high, I guess. So, I decided to retrieve it.

I knew, of course, that this was really stupid. The ice had already melted further out, and it was open water about 20 feet past the tire. Every year there was at least one story of a kid falling through the ice and drowning.

I inched out on the ice, testing its strength with each step before I put my full weight down. In a few minutes I was almost to the tire, when I heard a cracking sound and felt the ice move. I hadn’t fallen through; the entire section I was on had broken off and was drifting out into open water.

I scuttled back to the edge of my floe closest to shore. There is no photographic record of this event, but this was my situation: 

The wind was rapidly pushing me out in the lake; already the gap was 10 feet and visibly widening. I knew that jumping in the water and trying to swim to shore in my heavy winter clothes and boots might be fatal, but I could see my situation was worsening every second. I might have hesitated a moment, but I don’t remember that; I remember knowing what I had to do, and I did it.

I also remember the physical feeling of dread; I really, really did not want to jump in that icy water. I often get that same feeling when I have to do something I don’t want to do; for example, when I think about an unpleasant call I have to make to a client, or when I need to confront a coworker about an issue. When I get that feeling I think back to my experience on the ice, and ask myself if the situation is going to get better by putting it off. The answer is almost always no, and so I go ahead and get it over with.

There are a couple of reasons to move these kinds of tasks to the top of the priority list. First, if the situation is such that it provokes a physical feeling of dread, it probably is really important to deal with it. Even more importantly, if the situation is not resolved at some level your mind will continue processing it, and it will pop up again and again provoking the same bad feelings until you finally do deal with it.