6
Finish What You Start
I once was asked to evaluate and coach a mid-level insurance company executive I’ll call “Juggler.” Juggler was so busy with so many responsibilities and projects, she was becoming a bottleneck—always working on things, but not finishing them. Her boss and colleagues were starting to complain.
When I appeared at Juggler’s door for our scheduled meeting, she was staring intently at her computer. She hadn’t yet noticed me, but her phone rang. Without looking away from the screen, Juggler answered the call on speaker: “I’m trying to finish up a calculation and I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes. What’s up?”
I heard the caller say, “Sorry. I thought we had a call scheduled for right now.” Juggler responded, “Shoot. You’re right. I’m double-booked.” By now, Juggler had noticed me and gestured for me to come in and take a seat in her office.
The caller laughed, “Aren’t you always double-booked? We can reschedule.”
Juggler said, “Thanks. Send me an email. Sorry. Talk to you soon.” She disconnected the call and looked up at me.
I said, “Do you need a few minutes?”
Juggler said, “Don’t worry. Things are always like this. I’ve got so much going on. I’m always juggling.”
Once we got the interview going, she was eager to tell me all about that impressive workload. There was a whiteboard on Juggler’s office wall, with a long list of projects and responsibilities. I was thinking, “Ah, those are all the projects on which you are holding up your colleagues.”
“Tell me more about your role on project Q,” I inquired. “Tell me more about project J.” And so on. Juggler had a lot to say about each project, but I still couldn’t tell what she was actually doing.
Finally, I said, “OK. You arrive at work. You have a cup of coffee. Then what do you do—first, second, third?”
Juggler turned the computer screen toward me and showed me a double- and triple-booked schedule, with meetings and conference calls, plus a task manager with overflowing to-do items clearly rolling over from day to day.
I said, “But, which of those to-do items have you actually gotten done today?”
Juggler was at a loss. “I’ve been so busy all day, but I don’t even know what I’ve gotten done. Did you ever have one of those days?” I suspected that was how a lot of her days turned out.
Just then her mobile phone started buzzing, the computer was pinging, and the desk phone was ringing. Juggler said, “Give me just a minute, please, will you?”
One minute turned into another and another. There was something relatively urgent that Juggler needed to deal with, so we wrapped up our meeting and agreed to schedule a follow-up.
It’s not hard to see that Juggler is very busy. But she lacks the focus that would allow her to finish what she starts. Like so many people, Juggler spends way too much time at work awash in a tidal wave of emails; fielding interruptions of low importance; fielding interruptions of high importance (firefighting); attending too many mediocre meetings; and in the midst of all that, trying to squeeze in time to somehow focus on completing concrete tasks so she can clear them from her never-ending to-do list.
In a collaboration revolution workplace, where the lines of authority are unclear and priorities become muddled, almost everyone worth their salt will tell you they’re “always juggling.” Often, they say it as if it’s something to be proud of, proof that they are super busy with lots of “very important work.”
And it’s true: today you do need to work cross-functionally and handle a long and diverse list of responsibilities and projects. But that’s precisely why juggling doesn’t work. The busier you are and the heavier your workload, the less you can afford to be a juggler. Juggling is not a badge of honor. If you are juggling, it’s just a matter of time before you drop some balls. In the end, you can only finish one thing at a time. So you need tools that help you execute one thing at a time. In other words, the goal is not to juggle until you somehow, eventually—almost by chance—complete a task or project. The goal is to finish what you start.
Which is just another way of saying “Get sh-t done.”
Get Sh-t Done
One of my favorite senior executives, Mary Trout, who is an all-star MVP go-to person, says to most every new person she brings onto her team that one of her most important measures of success is simple: “Get sh-t done!” Everyone in her department knows the slogan well and many have the slogan emblazoned somewhere in their work area. One person has an 8.5" × 11" sheet of paper on his bulletin board with the initials “GSD” printed on it.
Done means done! Finished. Wrap it up. Complete one thing at a time. Then move on to the next thing.
Go-to people get sh-t done. You could say GSD is just another version of Sheryl Sandberg’s much-repeated quote, “Done is better than perfect.” So many people are so busy all the time, working so hard, but they do not GSD. At least, they don’t get enough SD. Some people get halfway down the road to completing a task, and then they have second thoughts. Suddenly they change directions.
OK, that happens. Maybe there is a shift in circumstances, something totally unanticipated. After all, you have to be “change ready,” flexible, adaptable, especially now when there’s so much uncertainty. Change happens, and you have to deal with it.
But too often, people get partly into a project, and all at once they get cold feet. They lose faith in the direction they’ve taken. Maybe they are afraid to fail. Maybe they are afraid to succeed. Or maybe they just lose steam and fizzle out. For whatever reason, they just can’t get all the way to the other side. And that ping or buzz or ring from one of their devices comes as a welcome diversion.
Or, even more common, people begin a task and then simply get distracted by the next buzz, ping, or ring. They convince themselves that they must respond—right now—or they’ll miss something urgent. Or they worry they’ll find themselves drowning later in the backlog of emails, texts, or voicemails they didn’t answer right away. (See the sidebar “Practice Good Email Hygiene.”) I’m not saying these aren’t legitimate concerns. But they’re often the reason that, day after day, jugglers just keep juggling—and don’t finish what they start.
Practice Good Email Hygiene
One symbol of the collaboration revolution must surely be the little mail icon on our devices. All day long, it flashes the growing numbers of new emails puffing up our inboxes. But if you’re responding to emails all day long (and into the night), you aren’t likely to get sh-t done. Here’s help:
- Send fewer and better messages (you’ll get fewer back in return).
- Before sending a message, ask yourself if you shouldn’t schedule a meeting with the person instead. Some things really are best communicated in person.
- Stop sending first drafts. Send first drafts to yourself.
- If you are messaging someone so you don’t forget to tell them something, send the reminder to yourself instead.
- Only send copies to people who need to be cc’d, and do not reply all unless you need to reply to all.
- Use red flags and other indicators sparingly and with true purpose.
- Make subject lines smart; context is everything.
- Change subject lines on later emails if the subject changes.
- Make messages brief, simple, and orderly.
- Create a simple folder system for filing incoming and outgoing electronic communication based on how you will use them later.
- Establish daily time blocks for reviewing and responding to electronic communication in batches rather than singly throughout the day. Manage people’s expectations by telling them about this practice. That will give them an idea of when to expect responses from you.
Don’t Be a Juggler
Think about it: “juggling” is just a concept-and-a-half away from “multitasking.” Multitasking, the wishful idea that a human being can do more than one thing at a time, has been largely debunked over the years by cognitive research. It turns out that what looks like multitasking at its best is actually “task shifting.” The brain can shift, very rapidly, between one focus and another, even among several points of focus. So what’s actually happening is not that the brain is focusing on several things at one time. Rather, it’s simply shifting attention, over and over again, like switching channels—however rapidly—from one thing to the next. Like juggling.
A plethora of studies in brain science (see, for example, the work of Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner at Stanford University), adding up to a growing body of research, demonstrates that juggling, multitasking, and other forms of “attention shifting” are highly inefficient. Simply, the brain works much faster and more accurately when attention is focused, for a stretch of time, on one thing at a time. The good news is that most people, according to the research, can focus on one thing in increments as long as thirty to forty-five minutes (at which point most brains need a little break).
That means you should set yourself up to work in focused increments without interruption—do-not-disturb zones in which you can execute and finish with tangible results, even if they are only chunks of a larger whole, one next step at a time. But most people in the workplace don’t do that. Most are always juggling, even though they think they are multitasking. They think they are doing more, but in truth they are doing less.
The classic examples are people who are always checking and responding to emails and texts during meetings. Maybe they really believe they’re both responding to the emails and listening in the meeting. But they’re actually not doing either one very well, certainly not with proper focus. “The meeting wasn’t very important anyway,” they might say. At which point I always want to ask, “How would you know? You weren’t paying attention!”
These kinds of people often think meetings are usually a waste of time. So, I ask them, “What are you doing to make the meeting valuable?” Because, with their inattention, they often contribute to making the meeting longer and less valuable. These are the people who inevitably chime in toward the end to make a point or ask a question that was already addressed earlier in the meeting—when their eyes were on their phone.
Meetings can actually be very valuable. Here you have a bunch of people in a room for x amount of time. It’s a huge investment of organizational resources—all that time and individual productive capacity channeled into one place and time. It is also a huge opportunity to share information, hear and respond spontaneously to each other, clarify priorities, make decisions, plan interdependent work such as handoffs from one person to another, troubleshoot, problem solve, check timelines, calibrate, and recalibrate. So, meetings are valuable, but only to the extent that people are focused enough to make them valuable.
And what about those emails and texts that jugglers are trying to address while sitting in the meeting? Aren’t those communications valuable enough to warrant your full attention? I always ask jugglers, “How can you concentrate on reading, digesting, and responding optimally to those emails with all that meeting chatter in your ears?” They might say, “Oh, those emails weren’t very important either.” Again, how could they possibly know? There’s no way they could be paying proper attention to those emails and texts. If they were, maybe they could make something important happen with them.
More to the point, who has time to do anything that’s “not important”? Or to spend any time on an email or a meeting that you consider so unimportant that it doesn’t require your focus?
If you want to be indispensable at work, you need to be known for executing on one important thing after another very well, very fast, all day long. That means purposefully contributing to the value of those things—be they meetings, emails, conversations, research, whatever—by giving them your full, focused attention.
Manage Your Time—Don’t Let It Manage You
Nearly every self-help guru has observed that self-management and time management are the same thing. If you seize control of your time, you seize control of you. But how?
Whenever I’m working with a person like Juggler, who is clearly working very hard but struggling to get things done, I want to know, “What are you actually doing?” I’m not trying to catch them. I’m trying to help them catch up by gaining control of their time.
Think of every minute of your time as a unit of productive capacity. Your productivity is measured in your output per labor unit. It’s not just how much time is allocated to one thing or another. The real measure is how much you get done in the time that is allocated.
Juggling means you are working in tiny increments of time, shifting back and forth between one thing and another, diminishing your speed and accuracy, and severely limiting the amount of focused execution time you have to block out for accomplishing high-priority items. The growing body of brain research shows that juggling, compared with focused execution, leads to increased error rates and diminished output. Focused execution, for longer increments of time (ideally thirty- to forty-five-minute increments), on the other hand, leads to decreased error rates and increased output.
So, don’t juggle. Instead, set aside focused execution time. The trick is to find those gaps in your schedule when you can focus and do—and actually get things done. Here’s how.
Keep a “Do” List—Not Just a To-Do List
Rafael works as a regulatory-affairs manager in an engineering firm. He has a near-superhuman workload, but he’s one of the best people I’ve seen at finishing what he starts. He keeps a schedule and a to-do list. But he also keeps a “do” list. He showed me his system. He keeps two whiteboards mounted on the wall on either side of his desk. One whiteboard tracks Rafael’s longer-term “Projects” (detailed in the left column) and his “Ongoing Responsibilities” for each project (detailed in the right column). That whiteboard was full when I saw it, and each item was color-coded to indicate its priority (e.g., red was his current priority number one).
The other whiteboard outlined Rafael’s current day, and it also had two columns. The heading on the left column read, “Today,” and it listed time slots in one-hour increments. The right-column heading read, simply, “Do.”
I was surprised to see that this second whiteboard was mostly empty, which I found odd because Rafael was always so incredibly productive. Isn’t “Today” supposed to be where all the action is?
The few things he’d listed on that whiteboard were in blocked-out time frames of thirty to sixty minutes. He had marked each time block with an arrow pointing to the “Do” column, where he’d written a brief notation (or a short list of notations).
Today |
Do |
|
|---|---|---|
6 a.m. |
||
7 |
||
8 |
||
9 |
||
10 |
➙ |
• paragraphs 3, 4 of safety filing SQF |
11 |
||
12 p.m. |
||
1 |
||
2 |
||
3 |
||
4 |
||
5 |
➙ |
• write paragraphs 5, 6 of SQF |
6 |
➙ |
• review SQF and prepare to submit |
7 |
||
8 |
||
9 |
||
10 |
You might think Rafael’s system was a version of the common practice of using whiteboards to track goals and schedules and maintain to-do lists. But Rafael said no. “That’s my ‘do’ list,” he told me, “not my ‘to-do’ list.” And, “That’s not my schedule. Those are the only gaps in my schedule.” He explained, “My schedule is back-to-back-to-back with meetings and conference calls. So I find and mark out those gaps every day, because those are my chance to focus”—and get sh-t done.
The two whiteboards are a great metaphor: while the longer-term list is relatively static, the daily list changes, not just every day, but all day long. Rafael said, “Those ‘do’ items almost never roll over from one day to the next. If it’s on my ‘do’ list, I get it done and erase it.”
So, don’t just keep a to-do list. Start keeping a daily “do” list. And don’t just keep a schedule. Identify your schedule gaps every day and use them for focused execution of the items on that “do” list.
Choose. Focus. Make It Count
Maybe you are thinking, “It’s not always my choice what to do and when.” You have too much to do and not enough time. You have a meeting. You have email. But you can only focus on one thing at a time. If you must choose, then choose. Meeting or email?
It’s not what you are doing that makes a task, responsibility, or project important or not, but rather how you are doing it. Is your attention focused or scattered? Here’s a simple rule: make everything you do count. If you must do it, then it’s important enough to focus on. Get it done, very well, very fast. That’s so simple, but most people don’t do it. Even most busy, successful people in senior roles don’t do it.
What about you? Are you making what you do count? One way to find out is by using a time log.
Keep a Time Log
The time log is a powerful tool that can help someone like Juggler, or you, gain control of your time. The time log will help you, if you do it in a truthful way. Be brutally honest with yourself about how you are really using your time—or how your time is using you.
Here’s the very simple and powerful idea: every time you change your activity, you make a note of it and log the time.
If you are really going to keep a log, you have to commit to it. That means you have your time log with you and note every time you change activities. Do it for five hours. Try it for ten. Try doing it from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day for three days, four days, five days. Do it for a while. You’ll see what I mean. It’s a powerful exercise: you will identify your biggest time wasters and, more important, the biggest schedule gaps in which you could get things done.
If you are a juggler, of course, this is going to be a very burdensome exercise. You’ll have to make so many entries. But, that’s one of the reasons it can be so powerful. It’s a reality check.
Imagine Juggler’s time log, including only my perspective, from the thirty-nine minutes I spent with her, as I described earlier:
2:58 p.m. |
Finishing calculation, didn’t finish it |
2:59 p.m. |
Answered phone call, ended it, will reschedule |
3:01 p.m. |
Meeting with consultant |
3:27 p.m. |
Incoming emails, texts, calls |
3:31 p.m. |
Better take the call |
3:32 p.m. |
Start looking at emails and texts, while on call |
3:33 p.m. |
Respond to text, still on call |
3:35 p.m. |
Respond to email, still on call |
3:37 p.m. |
End call, urgent situation to deal with … ended meeting with consultant prematurely, will reschedule |
3:38 p.m. |
Zoom in like the cavalry to deal with urgent situation |
__________________________________ |
|
6:20 p.m. |
Back at desk … trying to catch up |
6:21 p.m. |
???? |
Have you ever tried using a time log? Try it. Then evaluate and learn how you actually use that precious limited resource—your time:
- Compare your time log to your list of top priorities. How does your time spending line up with your top priorities?
- What (or who) are your biggest time wasters? What lowest-priority activities are taking up your time? How can you eliminate them?
- Identify your biggest sources of interruption. What can you do to better manage those interruptions?
- Identify any unexpected emergencies or urgent matters that required your attention. What can you do to better anticipate and prevent those emergencies or urgencies going forward?
- Identify opportunities to increase your efficiency. What can you streamline? What shortcuts can you take? What detours can you avoid?
Now make your schedule for the coming week, taking into account what you’ve learned from keeping the time log. The golden goose you are looking for is bigger chunks of time. That’s what you (and most people) are probably lacking. That’s one of the things holding you back.
The time log will give you that brutal reality check about how you are using your time and then motivate you to take control of your time. In essence, you will take control of your time by slowing down. It’s a two-part strategy:
- Increase your smallest increments of time, the time spans spent on one activity before shifting activities. That way, you will start juggling more slowly, even if you are still juggling. The more you increase the time frames during which you are focused on one activity, the more you will get done.
- Meanwhile, try to set aside more dedicated, bigger chunks of time (thirty to forty-five minutes) for focused execution on top priorities. The more dedicated time chunks you set aside, the more you will get done.
It’s simple: slow down the juggling. Increase your focused execution time. (Of course, it’s likely that some people will interrupt your focused execution time. See the sidebar “Dealing with Interruptions” for some tips.)
Dealing with Interruptions
No matter how many time chunks you manage to set aside, you are still going to get interrupted. What do you do?
One of the most relentless (some might say ruthless) time chunkers I know, an incredibly productive individual and a classic go-to person, taught me a very simple rule: “If the building is on fire, then interrupt me. Otherwise, almost anything can wait for forty-five minutes.”
People will still interrupt you. The more people interrupt you, the more you need to channel their interruptions into regular one-on-one structured dialogues, as discussed in chapter 3. Teach people what to expect from you: “If the building is on fire, then interrupt me. But otherwise, let’s schedule some time.”
This idea might irritate you. Maybe you’re the kind of person who likes telling colleagues, “My door is always open.” The trouble is, if you want to get sh-t done, your door can’t always be open.
The good news is that structured dialogue is always better and more productive than random, ad hoc communication—for everyone involved. And that strategy allows you to enjoy more thirty- to forty-five-minute chunks when you can work straight through, without interruption. The more chunks you have, the more you will get done and the more time you will create for yourself and others who want your attention.
Eventually, you will get to the point that the relentless time chunker I described above reached. He told me, “I set aside a chunk of time late in the day to sort through my interruptions and then respond to them. By late in the day, usually a good share of these interruptions becomes irrelevant. They go away on their own. Overtaken by events. Most of the rest, I send a note and schedule a time. That’s another dedicated time chunk.”
The problem with interruptions is that, if you deal with them as they come in, you have no way to rank them in order of priority. You take them as they come, regardless of how important they may be.
When you take control of your time and dedicate time chunks, you can allocate your time in order of priority.
Now, Take Control of Your Time
The goal is to start doing everything in larger increments of time and dedicating more and more big chunks to your most important activities.
So, do you know what your most important activities are right now? You will if you are going vertical and are aligned up and down your chain of command. What would your boss say were your most important activities? What would your boss’s boss say? What about your direct reports—do they know what they should be devoting their own time chunks to?
Are you aligning with your sideways and diagonal working partners? What are their priorities? Where do those square with those of your chain of command?
What are your own priorities? Set priorities and revisit them regularly. What are your most important tasks, responsibilities, and projects? What is the most important right now at work? Why? Are you sure? What is number two? Number three? Do you have time for any more than three right now? How are you allocating your time among your top three priorities right now?
It’s OK if you have five or ten or fifteen priorities. But you cannot, absolutely cannot, have more than three right now. What is right now for you? Today? Tomorrow? This week? Next week? Three weeks from now is a vision. It is not here yet. What are you going to do right now? Answering that question is how you gain control of your time right now.
If you have limited time and too much to do, then you need to set priorities—an order of precedence or preference for your tasks—so that you control what gets done first, second, and third. Today, what’s going to be first, second, and third? Nothing else matters today.
That means, every week, every day, plan every step of your work. Break big projects into manageable tasks, estimate accurately how long they will each take to complete, and set a timetable based on those realistic estimates. Sure, you will still have to juggle some. But remember, you are trying to quit.
OK, here’s the twist. If you are going to start getting more and more done, then you must expand your units of productive capacity and increase the number of increments in your day when you can set aside focused execution time. At the same time, you must break your work into smaller and smaller chunks. How small? That depends. As small as it takes to keep you moving from one concrete action to the next, from one next step to another, so you can finish what you start. Every concrete action can be broken down into smaller and smaller components, and each small component itself can be broken down into still smaller components.
Whenever I’m working with anybody, at any level, who is getting bogged down, working like crazy, but somehow not getting enough done, I always do the same thing: I help them break each concrete action into smaller chunks. Smaller and smaller chunks. Smaller and smaller. Until, if necessary, I am saying, “Send a message from your brain to your right index finger. Type the m key. Now send a message from your brain to your left index finger. Type the r key.” And so on.
It might sound crazy or extreme, but try it. Any time you get bogged down, break every task into its smaller and smaller components, and then start tackling them one small chunk at a time. You’ll see it works. You will start moving forward.
Bigger chunks of time. Smaller chunks of work. That’s the ticket.
Bite-Size Chunks of Work
There are a million metaphors for breaking bigger tasks into smaller pieces—projects broken into intermediate goals; intermediate goals into smaller goals; specific lists of concrete actions in between each of the smaller goals.
This is the metaphor I prefer: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I think of every concrete action as a bite-size chunk of an elephant. Here’s why that’s my preferred metaphor: you have to chew and swallow one bite of the elephant before you can take the next bite. So, don’t stuff your mouth with elephant. Carve up everything into bite-size chunks. Then bite, chew, swallow. Look around: do you need to tune in to an interruption? Let’s hope not. Bite, chew, swallow.
You don’t have to eat the whole elephant in one sitting. Set aside chunks of time every day—without interruptions—for focused execution, ideally thirty- to forty-five-minute time blocks. How many bite-size chunks can you eat at one sitting?
Everybody is different. You need to figure out your optimal time chunk for focusing and your optimal bite size. Maybe you’ll have different time chunks for different sorts of bites. Whatever it is, start there.
Do a time-motion study on your own work. For any task, responsibility, or project you are analyzing, you’ll have to do a separate time-motion study. This technique may appeal more to the obsessive-compulsive variety of overachievers, like one tax preparer I interviewed in an accounting firm who prided herself on moving through document lines swiftly and with precision; or the very artistic but also notably driven metal fabricator who showed me how he “keeps score” for himself all day long on the rate of his pieces completed to specs. There’s also the extroverted salesperson who counts every outgoing call, message left, call duration, hit rate on all the message points per call, and, of course, leads generated, and ultimately, completed sales. Why those measures? “That’s how we get paid, right? It’s that simple.”
It doesn’t matter what you do, if you want to do it faster and better, measure yourself in more-granular terms and use those measures to drive your performance. It’s a way of coaching yourself. If you want to run faster, you time your runs and maybe start timing each segment. If you want to do more push-ups, you count your push-ups. If you want to make sure to do good push-ups, you do them in front of the mirror and then be honest with yourself about your form.
Start by breaking each task into its component steps or checklist. Then break each step into a series of concrete actions:
- Bite
- Chew
- Swallow
Time each step within each task; time each concrete action within each step. How long does each task take? Each step within each task? Each concrete action within each step? That will tell you how much time the whole task takes.
How long do you think it should take? Create a time budget for every task, every step, every concrete action.
Take it to the next level. Use your time-motion budgets to help you keep score for yourself going forward.
- If you are behind schedule, do a micro-gap analysis. Identify the micro-gaps between the time budget you made and your actual time step by step, concrete action by concrete action. In these micro-gaps lie the potential opportunities to speed up.
- If you want to speed up, choose one concrete action at a time to accelerate and then work on speeding them up by closing the micro-gaps one by one. By going one concrete action at a time, you will minimize the chances of increased mistakes in the effort to speed up.
- Are you sure you are doing each concrete step correctly? Are you doing any unnecessary actions or steps that might slow you down? Are you encountering any recurring obstacles that you can remove?
Start with High-Leverage Time Investments
What if you can only set aside one chunk of time—thirty to forty-five minutes? Or one per week? Or one per day? If you can only set aside one chunk, how should you spend it? You should spend it on your top priority, of course. But what should that be?
Do you remember, when you were young, kids liked to ask each other a trick riddle? “If you could have any wish granted, but you have only one wish, what would you wish for?” The optimal answer, by some standards, was, “More wishes.” That’s the same answer to the question: “If you have just one chunk of dedicated time, what should your top priority be?” My answer: creating more chunks of dedicated time. How? By spending your dedicated time chunks doing what I call “high-leverage” activities. That is time you spend preventing a problem (fire prevention), putting in motion a necessary step that must precede a later step in a sequential process (preheating the oven before you can start baking), or activating someone or something else’s productive capacity (effectively delegating a task or, let’s say, programming the robot).
High-leverage time invested will save you more time later. Think of the steps laid out in the preceding chapters. They are all examples of super high-leverage time investments:
- Do the right things in the right order for the right reasons, one moment at a time, to add value and serve others. The purpose is to make things better for everybody in the long term and build up your real influence.
- Align your communication—up, down, sideways, and diagonal—through structured dialogue with anybody you are working with for any period of time.
- Do your due diligence—tuning in to every ask, considering the no gates, and turning every yes into a plan.
- Work smart—professionalizing everything you do with best practices, repeatable solutions, and job aids; specializing in whatever you do best; and expanding your repertoire of specialties.
Dedicating time blocks in your day to focused execution so you can start and finish one thing at a time on your “do” list is not just a high-leverage time investment, it is a meta-high-leverage time investment.
When you start getting serious about taking control of your time, it may be difficult at first. That’s because you will still be in the habit of juggling, and you’ll still have plenty of fires to fight. You don’t want to drop any balls. You can’t let the building burn down. So, you can’t just take control of all of your time all at once. You might have to get up earlier in the morning for a while in order to set aside those high-leverage chunks and start making more time for yourself.
Make the transition. Do it one meta-high-leverage chunk at a time. The more high-leverage time you set aside for yourself, the more time you are going to save for yourself in the future, creating more and more schedule gaps in which you can get things done.
There are 168 hours in a week. Nobody is creating any more hours. Actually, yes, you can. High-leverage time chunks are like a factory for manufacturing more time. That’s where you should be working, as much as possible.
What if you just started with one dedicated high-leverage time chunk per day? In your schedule, set aside that time chunk now for tomorrow. Just thirty to forty-five minutes. While you’re at it, set aside a chunk for every day this week. Then use those chunks. You’ll be amazed at the impact. The more time chunks you create, the more time chunks you will create.
Remember: GSD
Some people say, “It’s better to take the journey than to arrive at the destination.” Yes, in life. But, no, not at work. At work, you have to GSD. Done is better than perfect. Move on to the next thing. Finish what you start. Then keep getting better and better at working together. It’s all about lifting other people up and getting lifted up by other people. Focus your relationship building on the work, and the work will go better. Plan the next collaboration by looking around the corner together. The next chapter will show you how.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
• Don’t be a juggler.
– If you are juggling, it’s just a matter of time before you drop some balls.
• Get sh-t done.
– You can only finish one thing at a time.
• Find the gaps in your schedule.
– Your schedule gaps are uncommitted chunks of time.
• Turn your schedule gaps into do-not-disturb zones.
– Execute and finish tangible results, even if they are only chunks of a larger whole, one next step at a time.
• Make smaller and smaller chunks of work.
– Chew and swallow one bite of the elephant before you can take the next bite. You don’t have to eat the whole elephant in one sitting.
• Start keeping a daily “do” list.
– What are you going to do today, in those gaps—that do-not-disturb zone? Finish it, and erase it? Bite, chew, swallow.
• Start with high-leverage time.
– This is the time you spend preventing a problem, putting in motion a necessary step that must precede a later step in a sequential process, or activating someone or something else’s productive capacity.