How to Categorize Your Activities to Feel Productive

Regardless of how organized you are, various forces act against your personal feeling of happy productivity. As a programmer I could look back at the code that I’d written at the end of the day, point at it, and say “I did that.” I could also point at our ticket tracker and say “I did those tickets.” Even on frustrating days where there was a production issue or something gnarly to debug and fix, we would eventually solve the problem, commit the code, and again I could point at it and say “I did that!”

Several reasons explain why it’s often hard to find this satisfaction as a manager:

• You’re primarily working through other people, so there’s less to feel that you have tangibly done by yourself.

• You do dozens of little tasks rather than fewer substantial ones.

• You are context-switching throughout the day, which can be tiring and frustrating.

• More of your time is spent in meetings and discussions, which do not produce a concrete document, block of code, or production deploy.

• You’re more likely to be interrupted and just end up not being able to get your work done anyway!

If you’re unable to frame all of your managerial work in a way that is able to make you feel productive, then, with time, you may feel like your job is happening around you rather than feeling like you are doing your job.

There is, however, an answer. One of my managerial heroes is the late Andy Grove, who was one of the founders and long-term CEO of Intel. His advice [Gro95] for tackling this problem was to categorize the managerial activities that you partake in daily into four buckets:

• Information gathering
• Decision-making
• Nudging
• Being a role model

If you apply these categorizations to your activities within the day, then you’ll see how there’s more meaning in your work than you may originally think. You can also keep these categories in the front of your mind to better choose how to spend your time.

Let’s have a look at them in turn.

Information Gathering

As you may have gathered from the need to have a system to capture, record, and action tasks, which we introduced at the beginning of this chapter, the information that you hold is critical to your success as a manager. Your knowledge base is what you use to understand what is going on in your team and the wider company and is fundamentally what you base your decisions on. The activity of information gathering feeds this knowledge base.

It’s worth noting that information gathering isn’t a formal process. It can happen anywhere at any time. For example, you could be having a conversation at the coffee machine with your colleague when she mentions that her team is building a new API as part of another of the company’s products. You realize that this could be helpful for your own team, so you note it down. Weeks later, your product manager asks whether your team could build this feature yourselves. You already know that an API exists, so you make the connection between the teams, and you save your own team a lot of work.

Keep adding information to your knowledge base. Seek it out, ask questions, and be inquisitive. The desire to gather information will also motivate you to talk to others, make connections with your peers, and be a better manager.

Decision-Making

This is one of the more obvious answers to the question “What does a manager do?” You can make decisions of all sizes. These range from small, such as granting a holiday request, to large, such as deciding whether to migrate your application infrastructure into the cloud or keep it within your own data center.

Do take decision-making seriously. The ability to decide is a privilege that not everybody has. It’s easy to forget that there are many people who don’t have the power to decide particular outcomes, so always give decisions your full attention and take responsibility for the ramifications of making them. Every decision is an inflection point: should we hire Bob or Susan? Should we split the team into two sub-teams? Should we refuse to begin estimating the work required for this project when the proposal for the product is so unclear? Decisions such as these may seem like they’re small in that moment, but extrapolated over time and bringing in the cost of the different outcomes, they are big decisions, so treat them with respect.

Nudging

The concept of nudging is influencing a decision by contributing your own viewpoint to the discussion. For example, you may be involved in a discussion about whether to build or buy some particular software, and you make it clear how you feel about the situation. You are not the decision-maker, but you can influence the decision. Like decision-making, nudging can occur for decisions of all sizes. You may put your viewpoint across about whether to book a meeting immediately or tomorrow, or equally state your case in a discussion as to whether to open an office in the United Kingdom or abroad.

Try to view your daily interactions through the lens of nudging, and you’ll soon see that there are ample opportunities to broaden your influence on the organization, thus increasing your output as a manager. Like information gathering, this can also happen anywhere and any time. By having a managerial position, you also need to be aware that your word carries some authority, so bear that in mind when offering your opinion freely. This is especially true the more senior you get. Have you ever seen an offhand remark from the CEO turn into a real project even though she may not have wanted that to happen?

Being a Role Model

Being a good manager is about walking the walk as well as talking the talk. The best way to demonstrate to your staff and your peers is to lead by example. Be present and visible, get involved in day-to-day discussions, and contribute technically if you have the time and inclination. Demonstrating the standards that you wish to see others perform to is the best way to create change, so lead from the front! If you want to increase the flexibility your team has in their core office hours but you’re in the office from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. each day, then you’re not being a role model. Go home!

An Example Day Categorizing Your Activities

Let’s have a look at a reasonably typical day and see how we can categorize seemingly small and unimportant activities into opportunities to do managerial work.

8:45: You sit down and prioritize your to-do list. You read your emails and unread chat messages. Here you are information gathering. What’s going on? What do you need to do? How can you contribute?

9:00: You answer your emails. You contribute to various discussions with your viewpoint, which is nudging. You decide to make an offer to a candidate you interviewed yesterday. That’s decision-making.

9:10: While in the kitchen and making a tea, you have a conversation with a colleague and learn what they’re working on. Information gathering. You share how your own team tackled a similar technical issue. You suggest taking a similar approach. Nudging.

10:00: You attend a meeting to review a number of resumes that have come in over the last few days. You choose which to invite to a first interview. Decision-making. You suggest to the CTO that it’s a good idea to open the position out to more junior candidates now that the local universities are a few months away from having large numbers of students graduate. Nudging.

11:00: You’re in a one-to-one with a direct report. You are nudging them, as ideally you want to steer them into making their own autonomous decisions. You learn a lot about what the report has been working on this last week and how the issues have been overcome. Information gathering. You offer some opinions of how you might tackle the next piece of work. Nudging.

12:00: Lunch. You gather some food, rather than information, at this point. But while eating you do have a conversation with a colleague about his experiences using Jenkinsfiles, since your team has moved across to using these recently. You give some advice about who to talk to for them to learn more. Nudging.

12:30: You catch a colleague in the breakout area who shipped some new functionality last week. You tell them that their team did a brilliant job and that the user feedback has been great. You do this because you want your colleagues to get better at delivering honest feedback. Being a role model.

1:00: You go through your emails and messages, both information gathering and nudging. You have a decision to make about whether some work should be put into your team’s backlog or not. You decide that you need to talk more in person about the feature, so you set up a meeting for later.

3:00: You have the meeting. Your product owner describes how the work can make your own product more compelling, and you also know that you have the technical expertise to build it in such a way that other teams can use it too. You both decide to take the work on because contributing to other teams as well as your own is a good example to set. Decision-making and being a role model.

4:30: You spend the last couple of hours in the quiet going through items on your to-do list. One of these items is preparing an engineering talk on your latest project (being a role model). At the end of the day, you read your email (information gathering), review some pull requests (decision-making), and take part in a discussion in the back-end development channel about best practice around log aggregation (nudging).

When categorizing your day it’s possible to see how even fairly mundane interactions can be transformed into an opportunity to be a force for good and improve the organization that you work in. Also, when a day goes totally down the pan, you can always retroactively categorize elements of it as worthwhile, even if you didn’t make much progress on your to-do list.