When you plan something well there’s no need to rush
Software is the business of focus-, not time-management
We all have 24 hours. You don’t manage time. You manage your relationship with time.
Some call
that focus.
Some call it discipline.
What you have planned for the weekend or summer don’t impact your right-now. Your immediate focus can only ever be today.
You want change? What will you do differently today?
You want rest? When today will you rest?
You want your goal? What does it feel like to imagine it come-true today?
Spend your time aggressively on the right things
Don’t try to save time. “Oh! This or that was a time-saver.”
You get two choices.
Either you can focus on eliminating and analysing inefficiencies in short-term, repetitive tasks
Or you can focus on filling your calendar with activities that produce valuable outcomes. Focus your efforts to increase the leverage of every hour spent.
Invest into tooling to make your focus create larger outcomes with less cognitive effort.
Create tools to leverage your focus
I worked with many teams during my career. The largest accelerator of time spent is good tooling.
These include:
Tooling for your language
Tooling for your process
Tooling for your fixes
Tooling for your deployment
Tooling for collaboration
Tooling for your business
Tooling for your team
The last two are the biggest, in terms of productivity.
You know which items from the list teams neglect the most?
Yep.
I love this table from XKCD#1205. It’s mostly satire, but this one hits home real deep. You may know it, it’s called
Is it worth the time?
Nevermind the large things. Look at the small ones. You might be with your current company and your current tech team ~1-5 years. What have you been complaining about that takes 30 minutes daily for the past few years?
Did you spend at least 5 weeks on it? That’s 1 week a year. Not 5x5 work-days. 35 days. 24 hours each. That’s 840 hours.
Have you spent ~850 hours optimising a task that takes you 30 mins every day for 5 years?
Why not?
The math checks out. It’s worth it. But it’s hard to accept, isn’t it? How come this is so unintuitive?
Did you know 30 minutes is 6% of your workday? And you spend 33% of it on meetings and lunch.
How much timefocus will it take?
This touches on a sore subject in software: estimations.
Estimations matter in the context of what can be achieved and delivered today.
It never was,
and never will be
about the imagined fairy tale
that you have committed to and called roadmap.
Because it may erroneously be based on estimates
rather than using deadlines to constraint waste,
to eliminate needless activities
to make sure today is
focused.
If you truly want your team to win, you need to focus on delivering valuable outcomes way before the deadline.