Simple Acts of Everyday Rebellion for the Too-Busy Manager
Come back with me, way way way way way back in time.
Back to the holidays.
December 2011.
Remember those? I know – they’re already a distant memory.
How long did it take?
Until you were swept back into the busy-ness of business?
There’s that first day of feeling overwhelmed by the amount of email that’s piled up.
There’s that first week of getting back into run-t0-the-next-meeting shape
And now, you’re back to being too busy and time-stretched.
Take a breath
It’s only January 10th, so you’ve still got a chance to make a change and set a precedent for how the rest of the year might go.
Let me suggest three things you can do right now that will help you make 2012 more productive, more fun, more filled with Great Work and a little less exhausting.
1. Define your Great Work Project
- If you put David Allen, Tom Peters and Google’s Modus Operandi into a cocktail shaker and shake vigorously you get this insight:
- Projectize Everything.
- Projects have a start date and an end date and feedback on succeed/fail.
- Your job description on the other hand keeps on rolling forever, even in the event of your death. This is why there’s no escape ever from too much Good Work.
- If you could focus on just one project now that would be your Great Work Project, what would it be?
- And do that.
- (This is what allowed me to create End Malaria. The buying of which is a bonus act you might consider. $20 from every book goes to Malaria No More.)
- You find the time for your Great Work Project by taking…
2. A radical new approach to meetings
- Cut the bottom 10% of your meetings. Ask them to send you the minutes. Or just ask them to take you off the list.
- Cut the time of the meeting you schedule by 50%.
- Make the default time of a meeting 15 minutes.
- Read Al Pittampalli‘s treatise Read This Before Our Next Meeting
- The other way you find time to do your Great Work Project is to…
3. Embrace Adequate as your default standard
- I wanted straight A’s when I went to school. (I didn’t get them – thanks “Latin” – but I tried hard.)
- And now we’re all trying to do the same at work.
- But it’s a waste of your time, energy and focus – you might call all that your one and precious life – to keep trying to do everything excellently. Not to mention impossible
- Decide to deliver a few things at a jaw-droppingly, mind-bogglingly, awesome-inspiring standard of Excellent.
- And figure out what adequate (which means “good enough” so it will be good enough!) is for everything else you do.
I really like your third top tip Michael. It reminded me of one of the principles from improvisation: ‘be average’. Trying to be perfect can be such a block to getting anything done at all.
(Zen says it well too: “Cultivate ordinary mind”).
Cheers!
Stuart
Thanks, Stuart ~
Hi Michael
All for a radical approach to getting “beyond busy”! These are great practical suggestions for individuals. To get really radical we also have to address the wider culture of work and the busy paradigm of management and leadership.
I would love to hear your readers suggestions for how to challenge a busy work culture as well as individual approaches to change.
Come on everyone, lets build a wonderful crazy radical list here for 2012 ….
It’s a great call to action, Loretta and I quite agree – we need to think about organizational levers to make some of these changes
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Hey Michael – long time no speak (we met with Helen Duguid when I was still at Microsoft)
Great to see this kind of common sense approach being discussed. The challenge now is to help leaders try new things; the new world ain’t the old world – and what used to work is simply not going to work any more. Love to keep in touch
Regards
P
Paul – lovely to connect with you again here.