Posts Tagged: urgency

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3
Jun 09

Bring-me-a-Rock Schedule Game

Johanna Rothman writes about the bizarre, but oft-practiced, scheduling game Bring me a Rock:

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.

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30
May 09

Decide Now

About indecision and too much analysis, Seth writes:

“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.

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28
May 09

Real Priorities

Merlin Mann has some interesting thoughts around priorities:

“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.

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20
May 09

More Hours does not equal More Success

David on the lifestyle business:

“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.”

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6
Apr 09

Emergency? Plan ahead.

Seth says:

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.

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