In every organization, some employees spend an inordinate amount of time on tasks that don’t really matter. For instance, I once worked with an accountant whose job included preparing quarterly sales reports for a firm’s top executives. Although the executives told him that they needed only ballpark estimates, he devoted almost a week to analyzing each quarter’s sales data and making sure that the numbers were perfectly correct. As a result, his boss was reluctant to give him any new major projects—if it took him a week to estimate quarterly sales, how long would it take him to evaluate the financial statements of a merger candidate?
Though attention to detail is usually considered a positive attribute, your time commitment should vary according to the importance of a project and the needs of your audience. It may take you one day to do B+ work, but it may take the rest of the week to bump it up to an A. For your highest-ranked Objectives and Targets, it is usually worth spending that extra time and effort. But for most of your low-priority tasks, B+ is quite often “good enough.”
In this chapter, I will tell you about my key techniques for “not sweating the small stuff” to help you spend more time on your highest priorities. Then I’ll show you how to mitigate personal and bureaucratic forces that lead you to spend excessive time on low-priority tasks.
Once I received a letter with a deficiency notice from a state tax agency. Since the deficiency was small and I was busy, I put the letter on a shelf of a bookcase in my office. A week later I remembered that letter and wanted to send a response. But where had I left it? I wasted an hour searching for that letter—and then I had to read it again to remember what the deficiency was about in the first place.
Countless mistakes like that made me a convert to the principle of OHIO. This has nothing to do with the Buckeye State; it stands for “Only Handle It Once.” This means tackling your low-priority items immediately when you receive them, if possible. If you let a backlog develop, you will waste a lot of time and increase your anxiety level.
For example, every day you receive a barrage of requests for your time and knowledge—from your coworkers, your family, your friends, and people you don’t know. When you get a request, decide promptly whether you should ignore it or offer a response. As a general guideline, you should probably decide not to respond to 80 percent of all requests. These include spam from advertisers, daily reports from national groups, and even emails from your own organization, where you’re just one of hundreds of recipients and don’t need to take action. But they also include personalized requests that are not worth your time.
My general guideline is based on the 80-20 rule: that you get 80 percent of your benefit from 20 percent of your input. For instance, many sales reps make 80 percent of their money from 20 percent of their clients, but they spend most of their time dealing with the other 80 percent. Unless they can divert their less profitable clients to an assistant or website, they may be better off “firing” those clients and focusing on the 20 percent that actually drive their earnings.1 Apply a similar ratio to your personalized mail. You may need to be ruthless in determining which requests merit your time and which can be delegated or ignored.
If you determine that you need or want to respond to a request, figure out whether the request can be answered immediately or needs more information for a thoughtful response. If you can respond immediately, do so. If you need to wait a few days to gather information, put a reminder in your calendar to respond to the request on a specific date in the future.
Waiting—for an hour, a day, or a week—to respond to a legitimate request will double or triple the time involved. In the best case, you will have to reread the request and think again about the issues it raises. In the worst case, you will spend a significant amount of time trying to find the request again—before you can reread it and think again about the issues. Furthermore, if you delay a week before responding, that will lead the requester to think you don’t care about him or her.
Suppose you receive an email invitation to attend a conference on a subject directly relevant to your work. Under the principle of OHIO, you can see if the date and location are convenient and then immediately accept the invitation and book a flight if you decide to go.
Alternatively, you can wait a few days to turn your attention to this invitation. To begin with, you will have to search through your past emails to find the invitation. Then you will have to reread it, reconsult your calendar, and decide if you want to accept. These time-consuming extra steps can be avoided if you respond immediately to the conference invitation. Although the time you save seems minimal for each individual request, these are the sorts of behaviors that free up hours over the long run. By responding immediately to important requests, you will also impress the person making the request.
Aside from the OHIO principle, here are a few tips to help you deal efficiently with emails:
• Don’t get addicted to your email by checking it constantly! You’ll only distract yourself when you should be doing something else more productive. Instead, check your email on a set schedule—every hour or so. One caveat: if your boss insists that you reply to his or her emails immediately, you may grudgingly have to meet his or her time demands.
• If you want to be more ambitious in kicking your email addiction, you’ll need the cooperation of your colleagues. Work collectively with your firm to call an “email holiday”—a set hour (or more) each week when emails are banned.2
• If there’s a long thread of emails back and forth, look at the most recent reply first. The latest reply may have resolved whatever issues were brought up earlier in the conversation.
• Your inbox may be overflowing with “FYI” emails copied to you from your subordinates. If you are overwhelmed by such emails, ask your colleagues and employees to be more selective about what they send along.
• Similarly, think before you hit “reply all.” Does everyone really need to see your latest response?
• Lastly, a big pet peeve of mine: resist the urge to send a one-word reply saying, “Thanks!” Instead, show your thankfulness by minimizing the flow of emails to your helper.
As you apply the OHIO principle, you will find tasks that can’t be done immediately. Some are complex and important and require your full concentration; for such projects, you should quickly formulate a set of tentative conclusions, as I discussed in the previous chapter. Other tasks are simply long and tedious; you can’t finish them immediately, but you don’t need to devote much brainpower to them.
You can efficiently accomplish many of these low-priority chores by multitasking. I regularly take advantage of this strategy. I check—and sometimes respond to—my email on a BlackBerry as I stand in elevators or sit in taxis. I write short memos while listening to conference calls. In meetings where my full brainpower isn’t needed, I discreetly catch up on my reading. Being a compulsive multitasker has significantly boosted my productivity. Nevertheless, from personal experience, I can also tell you to beware of the cognitive and social limitations of multitasking.
How to Divide Your Brainpower
Executives dream of attending an important meeting while simultaneously reading an in-depth analysis of a possible acquisition. However, this is not feasible if you want to devote anything close to your full attention to both activities. The brain (specifically the prefrontal cortex) is simply not capable of fully focusing on more than one activity at the same time. So when people say that they are “multitasking,” their brains are really toggling back and forth among two or more activities—focusing on the acquisition analysis for ten seconds, then the meeting for five seconds, and so forth. This constant switching is quite inefficient. At every switch, your brain has to restart and refocus, wasting time and energy. You would be much better off doing one task at a time if either is critically important to you, as many researchers have pointed out.3
However, most people don’t multitask by trying to perform two important and strenuous mental tasks. Rather, they multitask by eating a sandwich while listening to a long conference call or checking email while attending a boring meeting. The key here is that neither activity really requires your full attention—you’re not trying to absorb and analyze all the information you receive. Instead, you’re monitoring one activity and waiting for cues that you should switch your attention to the other activity. When used this way, multitasking is a terrific method of accomplishing low-priority tasks.
I frequently multitask when I listen to conference calls that cover current political events in Washington. These calls cover many subjects of minimal interest to me, such as agricultural subsidies or political fund-raising. When those subjects are being discussed, I might also be skimming a report from my “to do” pile. But when I hear the conference call turning to a subject of significance to me, such as pension reform or securities regulation, I stop reading to give my full attention to the Washington developments in those two fields.
Similarly, at many board meetings, the first five or ten minutes are devoted to routine matters: approving the minutes from the prior meeting and reviewing the current meeting’s agenda. Since I’m well prepared for the meeting, those five or ten minutes are a waste of my time. I prefer to use the time to quietly catch up with my reading on my iPad—since all the board materials are also on my iPad, no one is the wiser. However, I stop reading and focus on the meeting once those preliminaries are completed.
So when you’re deciding whether to multitask, think about the relative importance of each task and how much brainpower it requires. Don’t try to do two important tasks simultaneously. Feel free to multitask if both tasks are low priority. If one task is important and the other isn’t, I believe that multitasking is generally appropriate. But there is an exception to this general rule: if the important task is so critical—say, defusing a land mine—that you don’t want to risk sparing any brainpower, don’t distract yourself with a second task!
Understanding the Social Limitations of Multitasking
As I’ve learned the hard way, the social considerations of multitasking can be delicate if you are interacting with another person. Multitasking on a conference call is one thing; the other participants usually don’t know what you’re doing. But if you multitask at a face-to-face meeting, other attendees may be offended. As you might imagine, this has been brought to my attention several times. Over the years I’ve learned that by checking my email at meetings, I may unwittingly convey the impression that I’m not taking the meeting—or the attendees—seriously. So I’ve learned to accommodate their sensitivities in many situations. The appropriateness of multitasking depends on the context and people involved.
Some rules of thumb: you should generally not multitask when dealing with customers or potential customers. They will usually treat it as a sign of disrespect and you are likely to lose them to a competitor. Similarly, don’t multitask when you are meeting with people who wield power over your business life, such as bosses and regulators. You cannot afford to risk offending them. Furthermore, don’t multitask in any circumstance in which you want to convey your total commitment: for instance, when leading a motivational session for employees. In such a situation, multitasking will undermine the message you are trying to convey.
Although this advice would seem to be common sense, well-meaning people (aside from me) have made foolish mistakes in this area. In 2009, the billionaire businessman Tom Golisano paid a political call on Malcolm Smith, the Democratic leader of the New York State Senate. While Golisano tried to discuss state politics, Smith reportedly checked his email multiple times on his BlackBerry. Golisano was so incensed by this apparent disrespect that he convinced two Democratic senators to switch parties, giving Republicans control of the State Senate.4
In other situations, especially with colleagues, it is socially acceptable to multitask. In some cases, your colleagues are partners to your productivity: they want you to get a lot done because that will help their productivity. In others, they know the heavy volume of your workload and accept your need to multitask in order to get everything done. Indeed, some of your colleagues may be multitasking as they are working with you.
But then there are the ambiguous situations where you’re not sure how your colleagues would react to multitasking. In that case, ask! When I’m unsure, I ask, “Do you mind if I multitask?” If people mind, they will say so. But most people don’t mind because I’ve had the courtesy to ask.
There is an evolving etiquette that allows you to check emails discreetly and occasionally during internal meetings. In a poll in 2009,5 one-third of workers said that they frequently checked emails during meetings. That percentage will surely rise as society becomes ever more connected. However, when “checking emails” turns into prolonged periods of inattention—not to mention checking Facebook or texting your friends—it’s inappropriate and unprofessional.
If I ran the world, I would have no problem with emailing during meetings as long as it was done quickly and not distracting to others. But there is a generation gap on this issue. Roughly one-third of senior executives find emailing in meetings disrespectful.6 I serve on one corporate board that bans emails at meetings but holds “email breaks” on a regular basis. However, I also serve as a strategic adviser to a group of young biotech executives, all of whom bring their smartphones to board meetings and check them periodically. There is no “right” answer on emailing; each group of colleagues has to develop an acceptable norm. Junior employees in particular would be wise to have an express discussion with their bosses about acceptable email behavior at meetings.
Accepting Imperfection
The OHIO principle and the strategy of multitasking should help you dispense with your small tasks as quickly as possible. But many professionals would question the wisdom of both of these strategies: “If I spend only a little time on each task, how can I ensure that everything gets done properly, without any mistakes?”
Unfortunately, this mind-set is counterproductive. Professionals who demand perfection out of every task—without regard to significance—will soon find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of their low-priority tasks. As a result, they won’t have time to accomplish their most important goals.
A colleague of mine used to spend days, and sometimes weeks, perfecting minor internal policies and procedures. He took care to address every conceivable contingency and cover every nuance, no matter how esoteric. By the end of the process, the policies were replete with footnotes and defined terms. Though completeness is a virtue, this level of depth was unnecessary because the particular risks involved were remote and inconsequential. But because he took so long on every minor project, his bosses were wary of handing him new or interesting assignments. He might have created the most comprehensive procedures, but at what cost?
This overemphasis on minor details leads some professionals to micromanage. In order to avoid even the slightest mistake, they feel the need to get overly involved in the projects of their subordinates, making every decision and directing every task. As a result, the manager spends far more time than is necessary to complete the project. I’ll discuss in chapter 10, “Managing Your Team,” how best to delegate functions more productively—but here’s a key point: give your subordinates substantial freedom to accomplish noncritical projects, even if that means a greater risk of mistakes. In that way, you can have more time to focus on your highest priorities.
Overcoming perfectionism is critical to becoming more efficient at work. When you spend a lot of time on a specific task, you typically run into diminishing returns. It can take you a few hours to write a descriptive memo that covers the consensus view of a certain topic. But it could take you another week to write a memo that develops new approaches to the same subject. It makes sense for you to spend the extra time and effort in pursuing one of your highest-ranked Objectives or Targets. However, you would be wasting your time to devote that much attention to low-priority tasks.
It’s true that having a keen eye for details may be a useful trait at the beginning of your career. Consider Marcus, a low-level employee in the human resources department. Marcus might rightfully spend hours going over the fine points of the firm’s compensation plans for hourly workers, checking for inconsistencies or ambiguities. In other words, because his primary job is to look over the details, he should make sure they are right.
On the other hand, as you move up in your career, you will need to worry less about every little detail. If Marcus wants to advance within the department, he will need to become more skilled at handling delicate personnel disputes and advising senior managers. To be successful in those areas, he will have to spend less time worrying about the intricacies of the compensation plans for hourly workers. If Marcus continues to obsess over minor details, he will never have enough time to develop higher-level skills.
Even if you recognize the need to complete small tasks quickly, you may find yourself blocked by time-consuming bureaucratic rules. For instance, when I worked for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I had to fill out an elaborate form in order to be reimbursed for small expense items such as an official lunch. If a colleague wanted to move furniture from one office to another, she was forbidden to do so herself. Instead, she had to call the Department of Corrections and request that a team of prisoners—orange jumpsuits and all—be brought in to move the furniture. Silly rules aren’t confined to government; some of the corporate email programs I’ve encountered filter out any email with even the mildest off-color word.
Don’t get me wrong: some bureaucratic rules are very useful. Indeed, if there is a relatively high potential for serious harm, a standardized set of procedures can effectively reduce risk. For instance, safety regulations for nuclear power plants help nuclear technicians avoid meltdowns, and regimented checklists for airline pilots help them safely get from point A to point B.
But I’m not talking about rules like these. Rather, I’m talking about rules that force professionals to spend a lot of time on low-priority tasks. I’m talking about bureaucracy that requires employees to fill out long forms or get preapproval from different layers of management. In my experience, rules like these are based on fear—a fear that employees will make too many errors if they are given the slightest bit of freedom.
Here’s an example from the U.S. Department of Defense. In the military, as in civilian life, officers often want to move people around to different units or different functions. However, as then secretary of defense Robert Gates observed, “A request for a dog-handling team in Afghanistan—or for any other unit—has to go through no fewer than five four-star headquarters in order to be processed, validated, and eventually dealt with.”7 Instead of planning operational details, officers were forced to spend too much time getting their reposition requests approved. Fortunately, Secretary Gates has worked to reduce some of those bureaucratic burdens by eliminating redundant headquarters8 and streamlining acquisition procedures.
So what can you do when your employees are faced with burdensome and overly broad rules?9 If you are in a position where you can change them, follow Gates’s example: order a comprehensive review of all your organization’s rules. Figure out what purpose each rule is trying to achieve, whether that purpose is important, and whether the rule actually works the way it’s supposed to. Then weigh the benefits against the burden it causes to employees.
But you can’t just talk to top executives and compliance officers; in a big bureaucracy, their image of a particular rule may be quite detached from reality. To get a better sense of how a rule works in practice, speak to the frontline employees (or customers!) who actually need to follow it. You’ll likely discover that many rules waste too much time or impose too much control.
If you’re not lucky enough to be in a position to eliminate those rules, learn how to deal with them—or get around them—as best as possible. Here are some specific suggestions:
• Learn the purpose of the relevant rule—there may be a legitimate reason that your proposed activity is restricted. If so, learn how to most efficiently deal with the rule; it is likely that it will come up repeatedly in your work, so you should be prepared to handle it with as little headache as possible.
• If the spirit of the rule is outdated or should not apply to your activity, try to figure out a creative way to interpret your proposed activity as outside the letter of the rule. For example, some companies quite reasonably prohibit flying first class in order to save money. But that prohibition should not apply to an employee who pays a low coach fare and gets a free upgrade.
• If a favorable interpretation is not feasible or too legally risky, ask for an exemption from the rule.
1. Discard most of the emails and letters you receive—80 percent of your inbox is crammed with low-priority items.
2. Respond immediately to important requests. Don’t waste time by having to refind an email or think twice about an appointment.
3. Multitasking is a good way of accomplishing low-priority tasks efficiently. It’s perfectly okay to skim a report while listening to a conference call.
4. Don’t try to multitask if both activities are mentally demanding. The rapid switching between topics wastes your brain’s energy.
5. Don’t multitask in front of actual or potential customers; they expect your full attention.
6. Reach an express agreement with your colleagues on what are acceptable emailing practices at meetings.
7. Accept that you can’t do every task perfectly. Turn in B+ work for your low-priority tasks so you can create A work where it matters more.
8. Avoid the tendency to micromanage. Give your subordinates significant freedom to complete projects, even if you think that could lead to a higher risk of mistakes.
9. If you have the power to do so, eliminate the bureaucratic rules that force your employees to fill out needless forms or get advance approval for trivial matters.
10. Learn how to deal with—or get around—bureaucratic impediments that force you to spend too much time on low-priority tasks.