My thinking around the topic has been evolving over time, and today I probably should tweak it to focus less on time and attention, and more on energy. That is to say, start your “time management” journey by paying attention to where are you putting your energy, enthusiasm, concentration, etc. It’ll help.

For now, I hope this little deck inspires you to do. Enjoy.

(OK, I admit it. There isn’t a lot of detail here. I figure you have the internets to help solve that issue. Right?)

But “focus” is the willful rejection of this theory. By saying no to alternatives you increase risk disproportionally to the reward. If you have the means to maintain a portfolio it certainly seems imprudent not to do so.

So why would someone want to focus?

The answer is that too much diversification is dangerous. It’s dilutive to everything the company uses to create value: its resources, its processes and its priorities. It dulls the mind and tarnishes the brand.

Presenter: How tall am I?
Crowd:5′8″! 5′9″! 2 metres!
Presenter: Go on, you can manage more than that. How tall am I?
Crowd: 6′2″?
Presenter: Come on! You can do better than that! HOW TALL AM I?
Crowd: (Giggles nervously.)
Presenter: Just because a project manager tells you you can do more, it doesn’t make it true.

If you’ve ever felt burned by an estimate, you’ll enjoy the levity.

“Things take the time they take, not the time you hope they will take. Pushing for half-time produces half-baked.”

I absolutely agree! When you push for a project to complete faster, something has to give. And more often than not, it is the quality that suffers because that’s the easiest cutback to hide in the short term.

Jerry is an author of more than 40 books, including “The Psychology of Computer Programming” and “Introduction to General Systems Thinking” and was the Manager of Operating Systems Development in the Project Mercury (1959–1963), which aimed to put a human in orbit around the Earth. (Thank you Wikipedia!)

“In my experience, most engineers with more than five years of experience are actually fairly good estimators, they just can’t estimate the amount of weekly bureaucracy they have to deal with.”

“[...] What people really mean when they say “I don’t have time” is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.

This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for  everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.”

“For some reason we believe that sweeping in and fixing a problem has more drama, and gains more attention, than doing the work to predict and avoid problems.”

I think the problem is also a blame game. If we acknowledged that there were ways we could avoid the fire, then we would implicitly own the problem and more so, be responsible for avoiding the next occurrence. But when the next fire comes, implicitly we’ve now failed. The goal was to avoid the fire, not react quickly. This requires strategic thinking.

So if we never acknowledge there is a change that could make things better, then when the fire comes, we just block and tackle — it is happening to us, not caused by us. No one is to blame for the fire, and thus our only measure of success is our reaction speed.

Blocking and tackling is easy. Strategic thinking is hard.

“You might think a lot gets done when you multitask, but a study conducted by Stanford researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner says it isn’t so.”

It doesn’t get more simple than that. If you want to know which one is more important in your own organization, ask this: If a planned release clearly can not be completed on time, do you cut features to make the schedule, or do you push the schedule out? If you cut features, I can promise you, you are also cutting quality and accuracy too.

“The average knowledge worker switches tasks every three minutes, and, once distracted, a worker takes nearly a half-hour to resume the original task, according to Gloria Mark, a leader in the new field of “interruption science.”

Interruptions and the requisite recovery time now consume 28 percent of a worker’s day, the business research firm Basex estimates. The risks are clear. As one top executive told me, “Knowledge work can’t be done in sound bites.” “

From Fighting a War Against Distraction via The Practice of Leadership

If this is your first visit to the OC, you’re a bit nervous. After all, these are the executives of the company. You start talking about the project, the benefits to the company, and then a stentorian voice rings out, “When will it be done?”

You think to yourself, Ok, we’ll skip to the end. Aloud, you say, “June 30.” The COO, the owner of the stentorian voice says, “Sorry, not good enough. Give me another date.” You think for a few seconds, and say, “Well, if we cut this feature, we could maybe make June 15.” “NOT GOOD ENOUGH”, exclaims the COO. You’re confused,“ Well, what date did you have in mind?” “I certainly don’t know. You’re the project manager. You tell me.”

Now you’re stuck. Clearly the COO is looking for a particular answer. But what is the right answer? If your palms weren’t sweaty before, they are now. Welcome to the Bring-me-a-rock schedule game.

Very well worth the read.

“Deciding now frees up your most valuable asset, time, so you can go work on something else. What happens if, starting today, you make every decision as soon as you have a reasonable amount of data?”

This seems to be a theme for him lately.

“Do nothing is the choice of people who are afraid. Do nothing is what you do if too many people have to agree. Do nothing is what happens if one person with no upside has to accept downside responsibility for a change. What’s in it for them to do anything? So they do nothing.”

Same basic idea as the Done Manifesto. Highlights:

#2. “Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.”
#5 “Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.”
#8 “Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.”

Love it. Decide, do, and move on to the next thing. Refinement doesn’t happen before you do something, refinement happens while your doing it, or later with version 2.

“You eventually learn that true priorities are like arms; if you think you have more than a couple, you’re either lying or crazy.”

He goes on to say that your priorities are what you are doing, not what you might theoretically like to do at any given moment.

“Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely — and this is really the important part — everything else in the universe can wait.”

I like to think of this in terms of checking email at work. Any any given moment during the work day, you can work on a project, or check your email. It is true that checking your email can lead to changes in a current project, but, at the moment when you pulled yourself away from whatever “priority” you were working on to check your email (before you knew what the contents of the email – which might have simply been some company wide memo about Earth Day), your priority was checking your email, not working the project.

As Merlin says, the priority was observed, not assigned.

“It’s been a long time since there was a direct correlation with the number of hours you work and the success you enjoy. It’s an antiquated notion from the days of manual labour that has no bearing on the world today. When you’re building products or services, there’s a nonlinear connection between input and output. You can put in just a little and still get out a spectacular lot.”

It’s amazing that people have so much time to fret about today’s emergency but almost no time at all to avoid tomorrow’s.

Agreed. I’ve got a number of emergencies just waiting to happen … and I’m not doing anything about it today, because it won’t be a problem till tomorrow. This is not good planning at all.

We live our lives around the clock. We wake up at a certain time, work on a schedule and base our performance on the amount of time it takes us to do things. More things done in less time = good. More time needed? Deadline not met? Unacceptable.

But it’s not just the clock that gives us anxiety; it’s basing our worth on how productive we are. We have this false belief that if we just finish everything on our to do lists, we’ll be done. After that, we can finally be happy, right? Unfortunately, that time never comes.

I think the root problem is not with a wish to be productive, but more to do with the fundamental disconnect between planning projects and executing them. If you took the script of how a project actually unfolded, and sent it back in time to when the project was being planned, most people would look at it and say disagree: “it won’t really happen that way”. Planning seems to invariably hope for the best (the happy path) and more accurate dates seem to feel invariably pessimistic with a lot of padding. This, I think, is the disconnect with deadlines and where the anxiety comes from.

In my own personal life, I find I can only vaguely predict what is happening this week. Next week’s events? I might just as easily name the date that Christ is to return. Work is no different – what I think I can accomplish for the day at 8am is wildly different than what was accomplished when I close up shop for the day.

Project planning is the same way. It is reasonably easy to predetermine a sequence of events, but identifying dates for when they will happen is largely meaningless.

You might say I just don’t have talent, or I am not thinking the project through well enough, but tell me this: when you know you have to cancel a meeting, do you know it months ahead of time? weeks? I find meetings are most often cancelled an hour before they start, and often the lead time is less than 5 minutes.

If we can’t habitually predict today’s events with accuracy, how can we possibly predict events weeks or months later?

Jason says it best

We release things when they are ready to be released, not based [on] a we-can-predict-the-future schedule.

Priorities shift, products change, new ideas bubble up, we discover new techniques and concepts, mistakes are made, external circumstances reveal themselves.

All those things make schedules a waste of time. They don’t account for surprises, new opportunities, gut feel, and human error. Schedules are too theoretical for our tastes.

The only time we start thinking about dates are when we’re really close to release. Then we can say “let’s try to get this out next Monday” or “Let’s do what we can over the next couple week and then go live with it.”

Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously.

Mr. Mann says:

“Multi-taskers” are really just splitting their time and attention into smaller slices than you; no one can really do more than one thing at a time.

Be sure to check out the related podcast episode on the topic, or the post How Doing It All Gets Nothing Done over at Get Rich Slowly.

Update: on a reread of the post, it appears that I said “Merlin” one to many times. It’s fixed now.

“With my patented “Ignore for a Week, Then Just Delete” system, you’ll get through your email faster than with any other system, guaranteed.” John Gruber via Twitter

“Let’s just have some ridiculous touchy-feely resolution.” Merlin Mann MacBreak Weekly #42

Aaron Mentele via Twitter

“A great way to think about what your principles are is to complete this sentence: “I would give others totally free rein to do this as long as they …” – what?” Getting Things Done by David Allen p66

“Fear, in other words, is a tax, and al-Qaeda and its ilk have done better at extracting it from Americans than the Internal Revenue Service…Never before have so few terrorized so many with so little.” Here’s How America Looks to the World By Josef Joffe

“everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.” Robert Rauschenberg

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” George Patton

Urgency is poisonous
“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.”

Why I love working with family people
“This is what companies need, startups or not. They need constraints and especially constraints on how often you can play the hero card to Get This Very Important Project Done.”

Why do we plan up front?
“Plans are a strategy against uncertainty. The problem is, they only make you certain of your imagination.”