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Three questions
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Okay! Thanks for giving me that feedback, it will help me make this newsletter better for you.
Here's what's on my mind this week.
A lot going on
An analogy occurred to me the other day to describe a problem I was having.
Someone asked me how my work was going. I was making only tiny, incremental progress, but on a whole lot of things. I was trying to do too much at once, and the result was not much actually getting done at all.
Here's my analogy:
Let's say you've got a lot going on. A literal lot, in fact. A parking lot. It's full of, say forty or fifty cars.
And you need to move them all to another lot nearby.
You could get in one car, drive it to the other parking area, and come back for the next car (hopefully a short walk). Repeat until done. That's probably what most of us would do.
But what would happen if, instead of moving one at a time, you moved each car only a few feet at a time?
Pretty soon, you'd have chaos all over the lot. Cars would be half in and half out of spaces, or stopped in the lane of travel. Many would be blocking other cars.
It would be a giant mess.
But we work like this all the time. Not just as individuals, but also as teams.
And the chaos only escalates faster if we have a team of people moving the cars.
Imagine I'm working with a team, and our instructions are:
- Get into a car, and drive it until you are stuck.
- No waiting! If you are blocked, go move another car while you wait.
- Move the lowest number (highest priority) cars first. So, as soon as you are unblocked on a lower number car, go back to moving that.
Okay, great. I get in car #1 and I get about 20 feet before I have to stop for car backing out of a spot.
Instead of waiting, I abandon car 1 and run around the lot until I find a low number car not already being moved, maybe #6.
I drive car 6 until I see that #1 is unblocked. I leave #6 for the new intern to deal with, and I go move car 1 again.
But soon enough, car 1 is blocked by car 3, which my coworker has stalled. I see car #5 is free, so I start driving that.
I get halfway down the driveway to the other lot, when the boss calls and says car 19 is now top priority. I stop #5 where it is.
When I get to car #19, it's blocked by car 8, which is stuck behind #6 because the intern can't drive a stick shift.
Meanwhile, my whole team is having similar experiences with other cars.
Lost yet? I sure am! We've been at it maybe twenty minutes, there are cars strewn all over the lot, and it's getting increasingly hard to do anything at all, let alone the top priority items.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
We may believe that any time not spent driving is wasted time. You can't have people just waiting around until something is unblocked! So we think.
And maybe that's true for a long delay. If car #1 has a flat tire which won't be fixed for hours, it doesn't make sense for me to wait.
But it definitely doesn't make sense to try to keep multiple cars "in progress" by moving each one a little at a time.
And yet this is what we often do. I'll spend an hour on one task, abandon it, spend half an hour on something else, then two hours on a third thing, take a break, pick up something else when I get back...
Why? Is it an attempt to "make progress" on everything at once?
If the owner of car #12 calls, we don't want to admit that "nobody's working on it yet." We want to say "it's 20% of the way there!"
Or we might think to ourselves: I've worked on thing A, but wouldn't it be better to at least "get things moving" for thing B as well?
We might simply want to work on something easier, more fun, or more interesting. I call this "workcrastination" - avoiding what I know I should be working on now, in favor of something more pleasant.
Or maybe I'm not even sure what I should be working on now. What is my top priority? Are my priorities poorly defined? Are they constantly changing?
In the case of my recent experience, I was working on whatever the boss told me was top priority in any given moment.
And "the boss" was my anxiety about not getting everything done. So the priority kept changing.
If everything's a priority, nothing is.
Fortunately, having dialed down the pressure, I was able to get back into the swing of things. The anxiety is no longer the boss.
Getting (some) things done has reassured me (somewhat) that it's all under control (...mostly).
And I've given myself a more straightforward set of guidelines for prioritizing. That's helping too. I'm getting some of these "cars" moved to their final destination.
What do you think?
Does this analogy resonate with you? What's missing? Where does it land, and where does it fall apart?
As always, I would love to hear from you. Hit reply and let me know what's on your mind, about the analogy above, the newsletter, or anything else.
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Thanks for reading!