by Alison Green
One day, an expert in time management was speaking to a group of business students and, to drive home a point, used an illustration those students will never forget. As he stood in front of the group of high powered overachievers he said, “Okay, time for a quiz.”
Then he pulled out a one gallon, wide-mouthed Mason jar and set it on the table in front of him. Then he produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, into the jar. When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked, “Is this jar full?”
Everyone in the class said, “Yes.” Then he said, “Really?” He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar, causing pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the space between the big rocks. Then he asked the group once more, “Is the jar full?”
By this time the class was on to him. “Probably not,” one of them answered. “Good,” he replied. He reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in the jar, and it went into all of the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel. Once more he asked the question, “Is this jar full?” “No,” the class shouted.
Once again he said, “Good.” Then he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in until the jar was filled to the brim. Then he looked at the class and asked, “What is the point of this illustration?”
One eager beaver raised his hand and said, “The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard you can always fit some more things in it.”
“No,” the speaker replied, “that’s not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is: If you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all. What are the ‘big rocks’ in your life? Your children, your loved ones, your education, your dreams, a worthy cause, teaching or mentoring others, doing things that you love, time for yourself, your health, your significant other? Remember to put these big rocks in first or you’ll never get them in at all. If you sweat the little stuff (the gravel, the sand) then you’ll fill your life with little things you worry about that don’t really matter, and you’ll never have the real quality time you need to spend on the big, important stuff (the big rocks). So, tonight, or in the morning, when you are reflecting on this short story, ask yourself this question: What are the ‘big rocks’ in my life? Then, put those in your jar first.”1
Although this story is about getting priorities straight across all the realms of your life, it applies at work as well. You could easily fill most of your days with small things and never get to the big picture priorities that will significantly move your work forward. How often have you agreed to spend an hour at a meeting that wasn’t crucial for you when your to-do list was filled with high-impact but less urgent needs, like checking in on a project you’ve delegated or talking to an employee about a performance problem?
To avoid this, figure out what one or two items are most important to accomplish on any given day and make those your priorities. Whenever possible, do them first, before other things have the chance to intervene. The details will fill in where there’s room for them.
One of the best ways to free up time to focus on the big rocks is by delegating anything else you can. Let’s talk about what that means.
“The question you need to ask yourself is not, ‘Am I getting everything done?’ but, ‘Am I getting the most important things done?’“
RICKEN PATEL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AVAAZ
Tip 2: Comparative Advantage, or the Time Management Principle That Will Change Your Work Life
It’s one thing to say that you should delegate more; it’s entirely another to put it into practice. If you’re like most managers, the idea of delegating work that you think you could do better yourself makes you very, very nervous. And, you might think, if you have time to do everything yourself and you’re still achieving all your big goals, then you can skip right through this section. But assuming that you routinely don’t have time to get to everything or that you feel stretched too thin, then you’re going to need to delegate more.
Painful, we know. But here’s the thing: if you don’t deliberately choose what not to spend your time on, then those things will get chosen for you by default—or, rather, by the limited number of hours in the day—and they may not be the right items. Most frequently, the work that gets pushed aside so that you can focus on all the items coming at you right now are the big picture items that could more powerfully drive your work forward than all those little items combined. So while you might do a great job of drafting newsletter articles or proofreading documents, if that will keep you from reaching out to major funders or cultivating a highly promising prospect for your team, then it’s not the right use of your time.
If you took Economics 101, you might remember the principle of comparative advantage. You might be a bit better than your assistant at proofreading, but given your experience and role, you’re probably far more effective than she would be at talking to the media, cultivating donors, and hiring a new head of the communications department. You should be spending your time in the areas where you’re much better than your staff, because the payoff will be greater (Figure 11.1).
FIGURE 11.1. The Law of Comparative Advantage at Work
(ALMOST) NEVER STUFF AN ENVELOPE
Don’t feel silly or awkward about focusing intensely on the areas where you bring the most value and not spending time on the areas where you don’t. For instance, some nonprofits have an ethos that everyone should pitch in on projects like stuffing envelopes. This may be egalitarian, but it’s not a good use of resources. Your budget will go further if you hire temps to stuff envelopes while you stay focused on the higher-level work that only you can do. If you feel uncomfortable about this, explain that it’s not about pulling rank but about responsible use of limited resources.
In rare cases, pitching in like this can send a nice symbolic message that you’re all in the work together, but this should not become something you do on more than the very infrequent occasion.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should accept mediocre work. Continuing with the proofreading example, you should use the delegation principles we discussed in Chapter Two and make it clear to your assistant that when she’s done proofreading, there should be no typos, and you should spot-check her work and hold her accountable. And if she wasn’t a better proofreader than you to start, hopefully over time she will become that.
So this is the simple principle for knowing when you should delegate something: if you can delegate it, you should delegate it. In other words, work should flow downward to the lowest-level person who can do it well enough. That’s right: we said “well enough,” not “perfectly.”
One executive director we know described his feelings this way: “I’ve been told that I should let my staff take the calls from most of our volunteers and activists. But I feel like by doing it myself, I’m panning for gold. All sorts of nuggets come out of those conversations, and I don’t want to miss those.” Although we like the fact that the executive director was getting his hands dirty enough to know what was going on in the field, in spending his time taking all of these routine calls, he was letting entire gold mountains go unexplored because he greatly cut into the time he had available for overseeing strategy and raising funds. He has since shifted out of this mode and generated several sizable contributions that might not have otherwise happened.
Tip 3: You’re a Manager, So Spend Time Managing
The corollary of delegating as much as you can is that while you do less, you should guide more. And guiding takes time. Whether it’s reviewing drafts and giving feedback, having check-in meetings to help your staff members sort out their priorities, visiting the field so you can see how your team’s work is playing out in real life, or preparing for a coaching-out conversation, a sizable portion of your work now is to help shape the work of others.
Many new managers fail to make the shift from doing t
o guiding. They spend just as much time as they used to on their own work, and they try to squeeze in managing others between the cracks, almost treating that part of their job as an inconvenience. They end up in a vicious cycle, where work they delegate gets done poorly because they don’t invest the time to manage it well. So they take on the work themselves and then have less time to supervise other work they have delegated, which in turn goes poorly, so they take that work on too.
Avoid the trap of the manager who doesn’t manage: change how you allocate your time so you can get the benefits of having others working for you. It’s simple leverage: if you have a team of five people and you can make each of them successful, you’ll get much more done through them than you will if you try to do all the work yourself.
Tip 4: Manage Your Calendar; Don’t Let It Manage You
Your calendar can fill up with meetings and other obligations to the point that you don’t have any time left to work on your biggest priorities. Rather than just hoping time will become available, review your calendar regularly and make sure you have time carved out to work on whatever is most important for you to spend time on.
Two specific techniques can be quite helpful here. First, schedule time on your calendar for specific pieces of work, particularly things you need to do yourself (most people are reasonably good at scheduling meetings with others when they need to, so think of this as a meeting with yourself). For instance, if you know the next step in filling the vacancy on your team for a field organizer is for you to draft the job description, pull out your calendar and block off 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. on Monday just as you would for a meeting, and write, “Write job description.” That way, even if you end up having to move the time for a “real” meeting, you know that you better block off another chunk or the job description may not get done.
Beyond blocking off time for specific projects, a second good practice is to schedule work blocks into your calendar: two three- or four-hour blocks of time each week to do your most important work. Depending on the nature of your work in any given week, you might use these blocks to discuss a key project with your staff, write an update for the board, reach out to an important funder, or whatever else best meets your needs. Having that time set aside helps you avoid filling your calendar so full with other meetings—some important, some not—that you never have time to actually do the things that might most move your priorities forward.
Once you set up regular work blocks, make sure you preserve that time. Although in general you want your staff to err on the side of asking you a question when one arises (because you can often save a staff member hours of struggling by providing a few minutes of advice), it’s also important to feel comfortable protecting your time when you need to. If you’re interrupted with something that isn’t urgent, it can be fine to say, “I’m in a work block right now, so I’d love to save that if we can unless it’s urgent.”
And if constant interruptions are disrupting your ability to focus on your priorities, you might look at whether you’ve delegated broadly enough and given most of your staff sufficient ability to move priorities forward without constantly checking in with you.
Tip 5: Know When You Should Get More Involved
Despite everything you’ll do to protect your time, there are occasions when you should get more involved than you would in the normal course of business. You may recall the story in Chapter One of the manager who stepped in to do the job of his regional manager when that person was not moving as quickly as he needed to. Like that manager, you don’t want to be hands-off if there’s a crisis or something important going awry. One manager we know describes this approach as the helicopter theory: you circle the land in a helicopter, watching to make sure everything is moving along smoothly. When you spot what looks like smoke, you swoop in to engage.
Of course, when you need to swoop in like this, you should be examining why you need to be so involved. Is it because you’re short-staffed? Is there a problem with a particular staffer? For instance, if you see that an event coordinator is letting important planning elements drift, you should involve yourself to whatever extent necessary to ensure that the event is a success. But you should also make sure the coordinator knows you shouldn’t have needed to be involved at that level and that she isn’t meeting the bar you need from her.
ESTABLISHING STRONG SYSTEMS
In addition to using your time well, you need to find a system for organizing the many pieces of information, to-do items, and requests that will be coming at you throughout the day.
If you’re like many managers when we first encounter them, you have a full calendar, multiple to-do lists, sticky notes on your computer and phone, thousands of e-mails in your in-box, and a code-red stress level from the need to remember numerous items stored in your head.
As you are likely painfully aware, it’s pretty tough to see beyond the day-to-day and be a resource to your staff members when you’re struggling to stay afloat among the daily demands of your own work. Fortunately, there are systems that will organize the overwhelming morass and allow you to comfortably handle all the important information in a way that will free up your time rather than demanding more of it.
MAKE THE MOST OF AN ASSISTANT
Having an assistant is an incredibly powerful tool for making yourself more efficient—if you use the role effectively. Here are five ways to maximize the position:
In our experience, the best assistants tend not to be career assistants but less experienced workers who are smart, hyperefficient, energetic, and ambitious. They usually won’t stay in the position for more than a year or two, precisely because of the talents that make them excel in the role. But because a really good assistant will learn the job in just a few days, it’s worth it to accept some turnover in the position every year or two.
Be explicit from the start that it will be crucial for the assistant to have airtight systems that ensure 100 percent follow-through so that absolutely nothing can fall through the cracks. In order to rely on her to the extent you’re going to, you need to have perfect faith that once you transfer an item from your plate to hers, it won’t disappear.
Be explicit from the start that you’re going to delegate to her plenty of things that you could do yourself. This is important, because managers often feel embarrassed to ask an assistant to do small tasks that they could easily do themselves, such as printing documents, formatting a letter, or scheduling a meeting. So set the stage from the beginning. You can even say that you feel awkward about it but are going to force yourself to do it anyway, since you’re a bottleneck in the organization and therefore need to delegate anything that isn’t something only you can do.
Scheduling and setting up meetings often takes a lot of back and forth. Use your assistant for scheduling anything but the most uncomplicated appointments.
Maximize the organization’s use of the assistant. We’ve rarely seen an efficient assistant who wasn’t able to support multiple executives.
Criteria for a Good System
There are lots of systems that work well (and plenty of books and office supply stores that stand ready to sell them to you), but any good system should meet these five criteria:2
1. Every piece of information should have one designated home. And floating around your head does not (we repeat, does not!) count as a home. A good test of whether your system meets this standard is whether you can answer questions like these: A colleague calls you in the middle of a meeting and you say you’ll call her back. How will you ensure you do?
You have an idea over lunch that you want to follow up on when you get to the office. Where do you capture it?
A friend recommends a good book that you want to read next summer. How will you remember?
You receive an e-mailed agenda for next week’s staff meeting. What do you do with it?
2. Your system should funnel all the things coming at you into as few places as possible. If you have eight lists to consult, you’ll inevitably stop consulting
all of them and things will get missed.
3. Your system should be easy to maintain and should make your life easier, not harder. You don’t want a system that is a project unto itself.
4. Your system should focus you on the most important work at any given moment.
5. If you travel for your job, the system should be portable and accessible on the go.
The Three Homes System
You’ll want to come up with a system that works well for you. But if you’re stumped or if you want to see an example of one system that works well for many people, here’s one that meets the five criteria above and has saved the sanity of many a harried manager!
The system is built on three basic types of homes, paper or electronic, that capture all the pieces of information that come across your desk (Figure 11.2):
FIGURE 11.2. The Three Homes System—Before and After
A list, which keeps track of all action items and helps you identify what you should be spending your time on at any given moment
Folders, to store the key materials you need to do your work
The calendar, which captures every item with a date and feeds into your lists
STORAGE
Your folders will contain the materials you need for current and upcoming action items. Everything else should be kept in files that are easy to access. Adopt a categorization that works for you (alphabetical, grouped, or whatever else makes sense) and resist the temptation to overstuff your files: if you can’t find something easily or drop something in a file, you are less likely to use your system.
Given the volume of information and requests you receive every day, funneling each item into its proper place and keeping your lists up to date will require a bit of discipline. But we can’t overstate the value of organizing your work to make the most effective use of your time. Try this system for at least three weeks, tweaking it to meet your needs. Whether you stick with this system or find another, we guarantee a good system will help you get better results and make you less stressed because you won’t have to worry about what you may have forgotten.
