How much are you asking of yourself?
Are you trying to redline your performance all the time?
It doesn’t work.
We can go along for a little while like that, driving ahead nonstop, never taking our rest, but at some point the bill comes due. We get sick. We get burnt out. Or we just get so overtaxed that we can no longer deliver good work.
The trouble is, many of our plans are based on “happy path” estimates — the kind of projections that predict no downtime, no friction, no need to recharge the batteries, no time to sit and hash things out and think.
I don’t know about you, but my own experience tells me that I’m much more likely to impose these sorts of projections on myself than to have them imposed upon me. If someone else tries to force me to work like a madman, I balk. Yet if I lay out a plan that requires me to work like a madman, all too often I proceed without a second thought. Even though I know it doesn’t work.
The middle of the bell curve
The inspiration for these thoughts came while I was reading a post by Jason Fried at the Signal vs. Noise blog at 37signals:
. . . One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.
Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK. There are exceptions (a trade show, a conference), but those are rare.
When a few days extra turns into a few weeks extra then there’s a problem, but what really has to be done by Friday that can’t wait for Monday or Tuesday? If your deliveries are that critical to the hour or day, maybe you’re setting up false priorities and dangerous expectations. . . .
As is often the case with good blogs, the discussion in the comments magnifies the impact of the post itself, and I was particularly struck by a comment from a business software expert named Neil Wilson:
A good plan should have as much chance of being delivered early as it has late. That way you know you’re in the middle of the bell curve.
Work to tighten your standard deviations so that your estimates are tighter, resist all pressure to move the target to the left of the bell curve. It always ends in tears eventually. . . .
Wilson has it exactly right: you can’t spend all your time at the high end of the bell curve. Yet so many of us — at least if my experience is any guide — continue to plan as though we can deliver our best possible work, on demand, over and over, at top speed.
Worse, we project it for groups of people, and then we act surprised when different players have a hard time coordinating their efforts, or one part of the project runs long and holds up the other parts. The ubiquity of these over-optimistic projections explains the enduring influence of Fred Brooks’ classic book on software management, The Mythical Man-Month. We can’t project top work all the time, because human individuals and groups simply can’t work at the redline for more than short bursts of time.
As Wilson suggests, I and anyone else tempted to make these rosy projections need to get a grip on what we can do with solid work, as a matter of routine, whileworking at ordinary cruising speed.
Moving the bell curve higher
By close attention to smarter working habits and by constant deliberate practice, we can get better — maybe even much better — over time. And when we shift our personal bell curves, our average work will likewise improve. But that process takes time; it doesn’t come from burying the needle into the red.
What does it come from?
- Taking on challenges systematically, expanding expertise bit by bit.
- Eliminating trivia and minutia from the working day . . . which means changing personal habits . . . which implies a process that takes time.
- Building a skill set over time.
- Allowing all of these processes to build on each other over the long haul — to reap compound interest, you might say.
Sometimes, sure, we have to go over the top — we have to respond to a special challenge with special effort in a short span of time. But living in the red is a recipe for flaming out.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. It makes sense to acknowledge it.
My questions to you:
What are you doing to expand your capacities?
Are you guilty of planning for best-case scenarios?
How would your working life improve if you projected
your work more realistically?
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Related posts:
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(Image from Wikipedia.)
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The obstacle to making this change and ones like it is that we — that is, our culture — has produced an environment that doesn’t value truths like this. In other words, even when we know how it must work, we don’t care. The King James Bible has a wonderful phrase I find useful all too often: willingly ignorant.
We continue to revere and point out when someone had to work 25-hour days and 8-day weeks to achieve their goals and get the job done. Anyone who is seen as talking about doing less is considered the problem. We always want to hire the guy who never says, “It can’t be done.” “Whatever I ask of her, she always finds a way to get it done.” (Yeah, and she hates you and herself for it.)
Every race car driver respects the red, but business people, unfortunately, don’t have a meter that tells them with such clarity when they are getting into the red, and we tend to err on the side of what is expected of us, the pressure exerted on us by our culture, and, ultimately (and ironically) our own weakness and laziness. Who says we have to stay in a job/life where these kinds of expectations exist? It’s just easier to “soldier through” than put in the work to find an environment where these kinds of values exist and make the necessary sacrifices to be there instead.
I’d love to see a collection of thoughts from business giants like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, etc., on how “respecting the red” was key to their success. The quickest course to change, it seems to me, is to get the leaders vocal about that change.
But could there be such a collection? The biggest obstacle to changing our culture’s philosophy on this is the possibility (and certainly our belief) that success is possible — indeed, quicker — by ignoring this principle. No pain, no gain. Work through the hurt. “Betty’s great — she comes into work even with a 112 temperature. That helped us win the We Own The World account.”
This is a very simple, but powerful post. And Chris’s comment about the reverence accorded to those who work 25 hour days even more so.
One reason that people continue to create “happy path” estimates is that they don’t break their work — to say nothing of their projects — down into individual steps and assign durations for each activity. We have a finite inventory of time to spend each week on our work, and unless we can see what we’re spending it on, and how much we’re spending, we can’t very well create realistic plans and timetables.
I know I’m being a bit simplistic, but I really believe that people would do much better if they only made their work visible by mindfully allocating time on their calendars to each task & commitment on their list. This exercise won’t avoid delays and problems, but will help people anticipate and prepare for them.
Chris - This is a great comment. The symptoms you describe aren’t helped by the advice of Michael Bloomberg, in a commencement address a while back, that young people who want to get ahead should be the first ones in the office, the last ones to leave, and never take vacations. That’s what HE did, yes, but he’s not allowing for the fact (seems like a fact to me, anyway) that he’s wired differently than most. Oh, and that such a schedule, which he kept religiously in his finance days and while building Bloomberg, cost him two marriages. There are plenty of us who don’t WANT to be Mike Bloomberg. So what about us? It takes a better sense of balance.
By the way, I think that you probably could find anecdotes about the kind of non-redline balance you’re talking about from the life of Warren Buffett. Perhaps out of all great business leaders, he seems to be the one most in tune with what people are and aren’t capable of. He knows people make mistakes. He knows we’re tempted to laziness and to overwork. And he makes accommodations for these realities, instead of pretending that they don’t exist.
Dan - I agree with you. Big projects often make people either (1) overwork like crazy or (2) avoid working on them because they’re too daunting. Better would be to figure out how much we can realistically accomplish in a week, then block out of the time accordingly. My schedule is fairly light on meetings (in some small part, maybe, because I’ve made it very clear that I dislike meetings), so I’m always amazed when I see colleagues’ schedules that are stuffed to the gills with meetings. When are they supposed to get anything *done*? All of this throws me back on Steven Covey’s basic admonition in “First Things First” to schedule *blocks* of time for accomplishing what’s *most* important in your work.
By the way, I think this meshes with the other comment you left on the time-and-attention post. We knowledge workers tend NOT to do a good job of analyzing our work, breaking it down into parts, getting “Toyota” on it, and addressing the parts of our projects that most need addressing.
For both of you: Now that we have a better diagnosis of the problem . . . what do we DO about it?
Oh, you want a *solution*? That will cost extra.
What do we do about it? First, I think that top management has to set the right tone and expectations. Your point about Bloomberg is spot-on. Not everyone wants to work like him, or can work like him. It’s incumbent upon business leaders to recognize this fact. (Or to only hire people who are willing and able to work like that.)
Further, I think that management must be willing to have an employee come to them with an impossible schedule and help them prioritize — and eliminate some of — those tasks. All too often, management only says, “Get it done. Now.”
I don’t want to lay all responsibility at the feet of management. Knowledge workers must take responsibility for managing their own work and their own time. They have to “get Toyota” on it, rather than just throw up their hands feebly and whine about being too busy to get all the work done. They must be committed to constantly seeking better ways to do their work.
This last element is really what Toyota is all about. As the journalist Charles Fishman pointed out, the company is really a problem solving machine, always looking for better ways to do things. That they happen to make cars is incidental. They’d be the same amazing operation if they made gumballs.