Am I wasting time?
I can handle the idea of a setback, or a mistake, or an unforeseen outcome. If your job is to pursue and achieve goals, these things are realities. What I was never good at dealing with, what I feared most, were those situations where I thought I might be wasting time. If you are leader in a company or a team, trying to figure out if you are wasting time or not can be a struggle; and we don’t talk about that struggle enough. Some things take longer, some pursuits have fewer obstacles to overcome, timing and experience and a ton of other things can impact how bumpy a course of action is going to be. But once you establish that a goal is worthy, how do you know if you are truly going after it, and not just generating a bunch of smart sounding activity? Wasting time scares me for some reason, so I eventually adopted a mantra that helps me understand if I am actually building something that is moving me closer to a goal, or blindly squandering everyone’s time.
Companies are machines, machines built to pursue goals,
You are always building the machine as you go, and there is always a goal in your sights,
The machine, well designed, simply overcomes the obstacles to that goal,
Every action should be in service of moving closer to your goal and improving the machine simultaneously,
If these two things are not present in every case, then you are probably wasting time
I did not invent this machine perspective; it was assembled using thinking done by others. I started my career in manufacturing and we did a ton of lean-process modelling that rubbed off on me. I also really like machines (cars, bikes, nuclear reactors and my Vitamix blender). If this strikes you as esoteric, I apologize but it’s OK because I think there are some underlying principles that are actually more helpful. Whenever I felt like I might be wasting time, it was always around the failure to nail one or all of these three things:
Choose execution over luck
People throw the word execution around a lot. If you ever stop and wonder what good execution actually is, you are not alone. Most of us can spot good execution after the fact, but that is not helpful when you are struggling in the middle of it. What is really important to internalize, is that poor execution literally means you are HOPING a thing will work out. For most of us, hoping is not good enough and is a waste of time. To ensure you are actually choosing to execute well, rather than just vigorously going through the motions and hoping it will work out, I would obsess on these questions:
Do you have a clear, specific goal in front of you?
Are you following a perfectly understood design on how to get there?
Are you sufficiently obsessed with the best way to measure your progress?
Choose consistency over intensity
It’s hard to argue against intensity because we like to reward people for working super hard, crashing through barriers, pivoting on a dime etc. These acts of heroism require intensity. However, I believe if you are not doing something consistently, then you are probably not really doing it all. Machines are useful because they operate in a consistent fashion to achieve a goal - this is how they are judged and intensity is not really a part of it. I wonder sometimes if intensity is driven more by our emotions; our need to feel like something is getting done. By contrast, consistency sounds slow and boring and gives us little or no emotional comfort. Have you ever rallied your troops on a tough Monday morning by saying “Hey everyone let’s all dig deep and be super consistent this week“? … me neither, but perhaps we should. I like fitness as an analogy for this struggle:
On those days, when you feel out of shape, going to the gym and lifting the heaviest weights as many times as you can, might make you feel better - but you are not really winning at your goal to be fit. In fact, you are probably wasting time and may even be damaging yourself in the process. To be fit you need to be consistent: working out several times a week and following a proper course of training (including some exercises you might hate doing).
When you are consistent, you are always either moving towards your goal, or refining your machine, or both. It’s boring, but it works.
Be curious not just smart
Smart is good. We all want to be smart. People are attracted to smart people and we are taught that smart people win. However, I believe people often waste time and energy trying to be smart. Precious meeting time can be taken up by people taking turns being smart. Moments of learning are missed because we decided instead to test out how smart we are. Smart is sometimes the enemy of simple, so things get overbuilt or bogged down in wasteful debate. Being smart is overrated. Let’s face it, we are all pretty smart! So instead of trying to be smart all the time, why not simply be curious. Sure, curiosity sounds humble, slow, boring and possibly vulnerable. You don’t often hear folks brag about their curiosity. But science would be nowhere without curiosity. Curiosity is genuine and makes it OK to keep asking questions. The things we learn and the capabilities we develop for our machines by being curious at every step virtually guarantee that no exercise will be a total waste. Of course we still need to pursue things in a smart and thoughtful way but sometimes I think the need to feel smart can be at odds with our natural curiosity. I want to offer something practical here so I will share three questions I try to ask myself:
Do you regularly seek out conversations where you pursue things you don’t know (about your customer's behaviours, emerging trends, business models you find intriguing etc.) or do you instead, strongly prefer conversations that help you prove the validity of your solution?
When you talk to people, do you see it as a chance to discover some incremental piece of a bigger puzzle, or do you see it as an opportunity to test yourself or impress them?
Do you ask questions from a position of genuine curiosity - because you really, really want the answer, or do you ask questions because you felt like someone needed to ask a smart question?
If a goal is worthy, pursuit of that goal can be a wonderful and fulfilling experience. It can also be a soul crushing, desperate sequence of misadventures that don’t lead anywhere. The difference is in the approach. I certainly won’t suggest that applying these or any other principles will guarantee you are successful in achieving a goal. But I do feel strongly that a good set of principles will guarantee that you will always move closer to that goal and the experience will be positive and valuable.
La Desintegración de la Persistencia de la Memoria, Salvador Dalí. 1954.
Dali played with expectations: we expect a watch to be solid, well-crafted, keeping perfect time. These timepieces, however, subvert that expectation. And if time is unreliable, then what guarantees do we have that any element of this world acts as expected?
