Every post I add a character that inspires me. Today, Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama. I love the way he looks at people despite his fight for Tibet. In an interview he said:
“We just need to look at children, smiling and playful. They never consider differences like religious faith or family background. Then gradually, as they grow up, they become more and more concerned about differences of nationality, religion, class. These are secondary differences, I feel. Actually, the seven billion human beings on this planet are fundamentally the same as human beings—we all want affection and happiness. (…)
If you really want to develop an altruistic attitude, and in order to do that minimize self-centered feeling, you need a sense of strong self!”
In the pursuit to build great products and organizations we need both empathy and a strong sense of self. Today I write about you, as someone building tech products, taking care of yourself - this is the cornerstone of great products.
If you ever worked in a high velocity / hyper growth company, you know the fact. This is a global problem in tech.
You work extenuating hours, going from a meeting to another with your team and stakeholders. Then you try to find a few focus minutes between them.
After a long day of alignments, getting through presentations, data and (hopefully) a few customer interviews, you need time to get things done - writing stories and product narratives, work on presentation, deep diving on some data, build an empathy map, and so on.
You end up working 12+ hours each day, always busy but with the feeling that you could do more. And in fact you could. Start by recognizing that busy is your enemy.
If you keep yourself busy you won't have time to think deep about the amount of information you have to process. You won't have time to have side projects. You won't have time to read and study topics you are interested - specially those not related with your work.
Why is that important? Doing great tech product is all about thinking in creative ways. Getting out of the status quo. Pushing the boundaries. You cannot do that being busy.
I see common pitfalls that lead us to busy:
Culture / status quo
Being hard on yourself
Lack of focus
Perfectionism
Micro management
I think the best way to avoid busy is to watch out for these and act against them. Let's explore each pattern in more detail so you can fight this common enemy and reclaim your time back.
Be sure that the culture is not pushing you to busy
Some environments prize for busy. It is like a competition for who works more. People prize working long hours and bosses use that as a criteria for success. The narrative punishes the individual, as David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) posted:
“Even more insidious about the concept of the hustle and its grind is how it places the failure of achievement squarely at the feet of the individual. Since it’s possible to “make it” by working yourself to the bone, it’s essentially your own damn fault if you don’t, and you deserve what pittance you may be left with.”
If you find yourself in that place there are two options: (i) if you like it, stay; (ii) if you don't like it I am afraid that you will have a hard time trying to change it - leave it if you can.
Don't push yourself (and others) too hard
Most people reading this are high performers and, as such, typically push themselves too hard. This is healthy up to a certain level. But it easily slips to the state of busy. That usually comes with a dose of perfectionism and micro management, trying to push the quality up doing yourself the work of others or aiming for unachievable goals.
As Seth Godin wrote:
Perfectionism is a cudgel and a way to hide.
Perfect is the often-attainable outcome of meeting spec. “That’s perfect!” says the delighted patron. (…)
Perfectionism is a way to berate others for not meeting imaginary standards. Or berating ourself as a way to avoid shipping the work.
The perfectionist desires an outcome that can never be achieved. That’s why they’re a perfectionist–to hide behind the impossible.
Remember that the best work comes when you and your team are at the best shape. The aim is not more, but better. It is healthy to frustrate some expectations you set for yourself. You will feel good about it if this comes together with focus.
Focus relentlessly
When you focus you can push hard on a few (even one) thing. That is the recipe for better - focusing relentlessly at the key levers that drive your product / business.
Citing DHH's post again:
Say no to more dumb shit. Engage with fewer things but at a higher intensity. Stick with it. Stop chasing so much.
That is harder than it sounds. You'll need to say no to most stakeholders and ideas. Letting some opportunities go will hurt you. The system bites back and you need to watch out.
The system is optimized for saying yes and starting. The shift to saying “not now” (and focusing on finishing) is painful.
Therefore the importance of continuously refining opportunities and finding insights about customers - this will help you focus on the right things and relief some pain.
Cut corners - but pay debts in time
Sometimes, even with focus and a healthy push, we still feel that things do not move forward. There is no sensation of progress.
This is typically because we are trying to avoid all risks and that never ends. Perfect is a way to hide, we discussed it earlier. To keep you busy in a false sensation of safety.
That is bad. It is important to cut corners and show progress. Tiny improvements have a powerful positive impact in morale - do not neglect it.
However, never forget that taking your way through without coming back to the problems you left behind is simply dumb. In fact, paying some debts in time is also a good way to progress and improve morale. Moreover, it will build trust among the team when you decide to cut corners to deliver value next time.
John Cutler summarizes it:
“These are two distinct problems: 1) things are awesome because we’re cutting corners, but we’ll pay for it later, and 2) we are cutting corners now, and things are not awesome. Both are challenging, and attract a different response from those on the front-lines. In most cases, someone is aware that corners are being cut. The danger of things being awesome, is that we discount those cut-corners altogether. When we’re craving awesome, we make up all sorts of excuses why it’s necessary to cut corners (without admitting that we’re in this mess because of prior corners cut). (…)
In a safe to fail environment we are free to make bets, including those that might involve cutting some corners.”
Build trust and watch from a distance
Last but not least a common problem for managers - micro management. Going through the details yourself, being the bottleneck of decision-making will definitely keep you busy. But that will only limit the impact your team will have - it is going to be limited by you.
As Andrew Grove writes in High Output Management:
A manager's output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence
When he talks about the day of a manager's day, he says:
My day always ends when I'm tired and ready to go home, not then I'm done. I am never done. (…) [A manager] should move to the point where his leverage is the greatest.
You will never be done, so you need to spend time thinking about your day and how to improve your leverage. That requires you spending a lot of time building trust among the team and creating discipline for decision making to happen without you but still in ways you would approve. Then you can watch from a distance and spending more time building leverage. Citing High Output management again:
So why are written reports necessary at all? They obviously can't provide timely information. What they do is constitute an archive of data, help to validate ad hoc inputs, and catch, in safety-net fashion, anything you may have missed. But reports also have another totally different function. As they are formulated and written, the author is forced to be more precise than he might be verbally. Hence their value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as he identifies and deals with trouble spots in the presentation. Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.
Therefore it is the manager's job to get the team out of busy too. So they have time to process information and become better decision makers. And you stay out of it.
That is the reason why I love to push teams to use different tools to convey information - here is a good resource of tools regarding user experience if you'd like to play with them.
Using these tools and frameworks right requires deep thought and out-of-box thinking. You can't do that if you keep yourself busy. Fight against it!
Always be curious,
Thanks for reading.