LESSON: Only by ruthlessly focusing and prioritising will you be able to create the space to think about – and deliver – what really matters.
TAMSIN IS THE CEO of a healthcare company. She has built her reputation on being able to juggle a hundred things, with the ability to fix any problem and always deliver. But as the business has matured, she seems to have lost her touch. The private equity firm that had originally backed her energy and passion early on are now raising doubts about whether she is the right person to lead the business going forward. They see an inability to focus on what really matters and to deliver the things that will make a real difference to the company. While they still appreciate her enthusiasm, they feel that the discipline to follow through on a plan, and get things over the line is missing. There is too much time being wasted. Too many missed deadlines. Ruthlessly, the board has recently parachuted in a new Chair who Tamsin feels is super-critical and dismissive of her efforts. I’d worked with the Chair before at another company, and she asked me to see Tamsin and talk about what was going on.
Easier said than done. Getting an appointment took all my guile. When we finally did have a time, she cancelled on the morning citing an emergency that came up at work. I’m always sceptical about people who use this as an excuse to break a commitment. If they are in charge of a Police Terrorist Unit, maybe, but otherwise what’s so urgent?
Anyway, I persevered and two weeks later I was sitting in Reception. When she arrived, twenty minutes after we were due to start, she was talking simultaneously to a colleague, who was trailing along in her wake, and on her mobile. You get the picture.
Once we had finally settled down in a meeting room (she’d had to kick people out because she hadn’t booked one), she spilled her phone, iPad, notebook and numerous folders all over the desk. ‘Busy?’ I asked. Not one for irony, she launched into a breathless, detailed list of all the things she had to do, and how brilliant everything was.
‘Well, luckily I don’t give a shit about any of that.’ I smiled.
That stopped her.
‘What’s not going well?’
She looked genuinely confused, as if I had asked her to explain the theory of relativity. Her phone rang. Saved by the bell. She at least had the awareness to look at me as she reached for it. I grimaced and shook my head. Her hand froze. A second later she answered it, mouthing apologies to me. She ended the call quickly and put the phone back down, glanced at me, and then with a look of genuine pain on her face reached forward and put it on silent.
She began to talk about what she felt about the investors’ and the Chair’s criticism. How unfair it was.
‘What bit is fair?’ I asked.
This question seemed to slow her down. You could almost see her embrace – or at least begin to tolerate – something she had tried to shut out.
I smiled at her. ‘It’s so hard, this,’ I said, ‘because it really strikes at your own image of yourself. What has made you strong for so long.’
‘Mmm…’ she said ruefully. ‘It is hard, you are right.’
She started to tear up.
‘I know people have started to lose faith in me, not just the investors, but my team … I know I’m letting people down …’
As she started this more real conversation and focused on being in the room and in the moment with me, she gradually relaxed. She was able to own some of the criticisms that were being made of her. But I could see, even when she let down some of her defences, that she was in denial about how bad things had become. I suggested that I get some feedback from her colleagues and that we look at all this again next time we met. As time was of the essence, that was going to have to be in the next couple of weeks. She reluctantly accepted this. When I told her we’d be meeting for three hours, in my office not hers, she looked like she was going to be sick.
Hats off to her, though, the next week she turned up. The feedback was, alas, absolutely awful, the worst I’d have to relay in over a decade. When faced with reporting such negativity I have learned that it is OK to deliver it straight. It serves no one to pull punches and deep down the person almost always knows all this anyway. Which doesn’t make hearing it any less a slap in the face. Nonetheless, a slap is sometimes exactly what is required to wake someone up. So I took a deep breath and read out what people really felt about Tamsin:
She doesn’t listen
She is all talk
I’ve basically caught her out in bare-faced lies
You can’t trust her
I now just avoid her and let her live in her fantasy world
She never does what she says she will do
You can’t rely on her to deliver
As I related all this, her expression was blank. Then she slowly turned red and began to sob.
‘I know. I know. I know,’ she sniffed. ‘They’re right.’
I gave her some space to get her emotions out and slowly pull herself together. I then asked her to tell me about herself. It was a sad story.
She’d never known her dad, and her mum had died when she was very young. She’d been in a series of foster homes, and ended up as a slightly unruly teenager in a children’s home. There, she had faced chaos, but had eventually found some happiness by making herself useful. Helping out the adults, dealing with the other kids, doing the cooking, babysitting, DIY. She felt she had a purpose, and she got praise for all she did.
When she left the home, she got a job as an admin assistant in a care home and the pattern repeated. She took on everything, never said no to anyone, and worked all the hours God sent. She eventually became the owners’ right-hand woman and when they retired, she took over, growing the company almost by sheer force of will. Keen to expand even further, she had taken outside investment a couple of years ago. She explained how taking over and then growing the company in its early days had been the best few years of her life.
‘Now they’re spoiling it,’ she concluded.
‘They?’ I challenged.
‘OK, maybe I am too, I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.’
Tamsin’s core pathogenic belief was that her purpose, her value, came from fixing everything herself. This fierce independence had driven her through the first part of her working life, but was ill-suited to the demands of a bigger, more formal business like the one that she had, ironically, built for herself. She overcommitted, let people down and couldn’t seem to see the wood for the trees, as someone put it to me in the feedback. When it was all about Tamsin, she and the business had thrived. Now it was about her planning and orchestrating a much bigger operation, she was like the proverbial fish out of water. As we discussed this, she recognised its truth.
Over the next few sessions we visualised her saying no to people (which she found excruciating, almost physically painful), and we explored the art of delegating. We worked on prioritisation and goal-setting, and discussed the notions of ‘perfectionism’ vs ‘good enough’ (which I explore on p. 271).
In the midst of all this, there was one ‘Eureka’ moment when we met one Monday morning. She mentioned that she was tired, as she had spent all weekend rewriting a PowerPoint proposal that had to be sent to a potential partner. She had felt she hadn’t done a good enough job, and had asked him to delete the original version and read her new one instead. Luckily, as he’d received the first version at 9.10pm on the Friday and the second at 7.45am on Monday morning, he hadn’t looked at it and so was able to do as she asked. Anyway, with Tamsin’s permission I conducted an experiment. I called the guy she’d sent the PPT to and asked him to do me a favour. I then re-sent him the original version that Tamsin had judged inadequate and asked for his sense of how they were different. I received an unfriendly email a day later implying I had wasted his time – ‘they are effectively the same’ was his terse conclusion.
Slowly, all of this, plus the other work we were doing, and the feedback from her team – which was now more open and frequent – began to make a difference. Tamsin seemed to realise that she had developed a way of working that left her in the midst of stress and chaos. She wasn’t prioritising what she needed to do, wasn’t planning her day, wasn’t creating the space to react thoughtfully as circumstances changed around her. Gradually, with my help, she began to change her approach to these things and started to develop a new Personal Operating System (or pOS, as I like to call it) – the set of very personal habits, rhythms and discipline that we bring to bear as we each try to get things done in the most productive way. We each have our hardware – intelligence, stamina etc. – but we need to integrate that with our own software – when and how we prefer to work – so that we can function optimally, just as Apple do with iPhones and iOS.
I introduced the idea of developing more discipline. Tamsin knew that she didn’t just need to stop doing certain things, she needed to start doing things differently. We spent about an hour discussing her current approach to working, dissecting each behaviour in turn, turning it around and imagining in vivid detail what she could do instead.
One practice in particular made a huge impact on her – time blocking. This involves organising your day in a more structured way, allocating time slots for particular activities and diarising these as you would a meeting or call. She immediately experienced a shift in her productivity levels and told me that it totally revolutionised how she plans and executes her day.
I was feeling good about the coaching and so was pretty surprised when my friend, the company’s Chair, rang me up with the news that Tamsin had resigned. She didn’t know much about why.
Later that day Tamsin called me herself and asked if we could meet for coffee.
‘I’m not ungrateful,’ she insisted, ‘and I have learnt some stuff that will stay with me, but the bottom line is, I’m not happy. I don’t want to be all “process” and structured. I don’t want to hem in my diary, delivering according to someone else’s plan not mine. I like being spontaneous, doing my firefighting and fixing. It’s what I do best.’ Her words had an uncanny echo of Darren’s in the last chapter. But then people are who they are – unless they decide they want to change, and put in the work to do so.
Her eyes searched mine.
‘I suppose you think that means I will fail.’
I took a breath. ‘I don’t know, Tamsin. I guess it depends on what you want to do.’
‘I know what I want to do,’ she said, sounding excited. ‘I want to start up a new business. I’ve got this idea …’ and she was away, not dissimilar in tone to how she had been when we’d first met that morning four months before.
As she held forth I felt we were about to see a classic example of what Freud called the ‘repetition compulsion’. Having failed to fix the great fixer, it was my turn to feel like a failure.
‘Einstein didn’t invent the theory of relativity while he was multitasking at the Swiss patent office.’
David E. Meyer, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan
(quoted by Winifred Gallagher in her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)
There is one aspect of work that is non-negotiable: delivering results. Unless you produce tangible results – however those results are measured – it is fair to say that you cannot be described as a truly effective professional. You can create space to reflect and learn and make wise decisions. You can focus on goals and develop great strategies, but without actually doing the work to deliver results, it will – in the commercial world and in many other contexts – all be for naught. As the popular business saying goes, execution is everything. The question everyone at work faces daily is how to be productive (not just busy) and deliver a task on time and to specification. Creating space to deliver means understanding how you work best; creating the conditions where your work can happen; then actually doing the work.
Executing, like all aspects of business life, has been the subject of many books and articles, and has been defined in numerous ways. In the seminal book on the subject, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Honeywell, and author and consultant Ram Charan state that ‘Execution is not just tactics – it is a discipline and a system. It has to be built into a company’s strategy, its goals, and its culture.’
Excelling at execution is also the worry that regularly tops the list of CEOs’ concerns in multiple surveys. Of all the skills required of a business leader, execution is the one which, in my opinion, depends most on the experience of having done things; of having done different things, in different circumstances, with differing degrees of success or failure. I would also suggest that, while people will have differing inherent executional capabilities, out of the key capabilities needed by executives it is the most developable. People’s ability to think strategically requires a particular way of thinking, and intellectual self-confidence; their purpose springs from deep within; their people skills are linked closely to genetic disposition and early upbringing; as is their sense of self-awareness. Executing, though, to an extent, is more of a discipline (hence Bossidy and Charan’s subtitle) than these others, so it should be more able to be learnt, practised and mastered.
When I reflect on my work with Tamsin, I see two issues. Here was a woman who had built her whole identity around being a fixer (what psychologists call ‘overfunctioning’) to such a degree that she couldn’t take the next step she had carved out for herself. Instead, she was driven by a need to be needed that had its roots in unfinished business from her childhood and young adulthood. Secondly, Tamsin had developed a set of habits that were not only damaging her reputation and risking her role in the company, they were also affecting her brain and physiology.
The identity Tamsin had constructed for herself – an identity which helped her feel secure and important, feelings which she hadn’t experienced in her early childhood – hinged on perpetual busyness. She had succumbed to the seductive idea that her worth as a human being correlated to hours spent on a never-ending treadmill of activity, but she had not learned how to attend to those activities in a focused way. Many of us are like Tamsin: we’ve got so much in our heads and on our plates that we stagger from one day to the next, almost everything on our to-do lists seeming urgent. We spread ourselves too thin, spin too many plates and juggle too many balls (and use too many metaphors), all the while quietly priding ourselves on how ‘busy’ we are – because, after all, busy must mean important. Busyness has become a badge of honour, and as Dr Brené Brown writes in The Gifts of Imperfection, anxiety has become a lifestyle and exhaustion a ‘status symbol of hard work.’ In a world where even children have schedules that are bursting at the seams with ‘play dates’ and extra-curricular activities, white space is often hard to come by.
What Tamsin didn’t appreciate is that it’s easy to be busy. Anyone can rush around like a blue-arsed fly, as my mum calls it. It takes enormous skill, discipline and leadership to be singularly focused – and it is increasingly rare. If, like Tamsin, you find yourself really, really busy, it might be uncomfortable yet revelatory to acknowledge that you may also be, counter-intuitively, really, really unproductive.
Overfunctioners like Tamsin are often driven by a need to prove how needed they are. Their behaviour is characterised by the busy work of taking care of everyone else: they are highly adaptable, dish out advice without being asked for it, ‘know’ what is best for others, rarely if ever say no to a request, feel responsible for everyone, put their hand up when volunteers are needed and commonly experience periodic, seemingly out-of-the-blue, burnout. A typical overfunctioner’s response to any request is ‘of course I can’, with barely a pause to reflect whether it is a priority or how doable the request is. In coaching, they often need reminding that they are here on earth first and foremost as human beings not human doings, and that their worth remains intact whatever they do or achieve (though it might take a while for this kind of feedback to ‘land’ and observable changes to begin).
There is another group of people, whose essential dynamic is the opposite to Tamsin’s. People who don’t take on too much but too little, who are unambitious, have low expectations and poor productivity. You might call them the world’s underachievers. Getting to the root cause of these people’s problems is hard as they can be many and varied. By definition I never come across them in my leadership consultancy work – they’d never get to that level. But I do occasionally see such people in my private psychotherapy practice, and even there, once we have looked at any deeper psychological and emotional issues, I will use the ideas contained in this part of the book – about prioritising, goal setting and planning – to try and lift people out of their rut. Sometimes the underlying issue is related to their sense of purpose, a subject we explore in Chapter 10.
For over- and underachievers, ironically, progress requires similar things: an exploration of what core beliefs underlie their behaviours, and a commitment to change, abandoning ingrained habits and forming new ones. There is one very modern habit that, in my experience, bedevils both types of people, which was personified in Tamsin. Her whole approach to working – the task juggling, the simultaneous conversations, the phone calls during her session with me – can be summed up in one word, multitasking.
Our understanding of this once prized capability has evolved dramatically in the last few years, and what we now know is that multitasking leaves a lot to be desired. While we can technically do two things at once, what we cannot do is concentrate on two things at once, as a 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found – interruptions of just 2.8 seconds resulted in double the errors by participants in an assigned task.
Yet most people whose jobs are primarily based in an office, even if they are not prone to Tamsin’s bad habits, have incredibly fractured workdays. A stream of meetings, emails, calls, texts, social media to check, colleagues dropping by your desk etc. One study found that CEOs, who you would think had the best chance of planning and policing their own time, experience on average just twenty-eight minutes of uninterrupted time a day. Lee Iacocca, the legendary CEO of Chrysler, described the problem pithily, describing how CEOs spend most of their time ‘fighting off time-wasting bullshit like a frantic fellow futilely waving his arms at a swarm of angry bees on the attack.’
The research is clear: we can’t dip in and out of activities with ease (and women, incidentally, are no better than men at this, despite the myth). It takes us quite a while to get back on track, or back into our ‘flow’, as one leading psychologist calls it, that mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment. Alas, according to Steven Kotler, author of The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, the average worker spends just 5 per cent of their work day in flow; echoing an almost unbelievable 2015 Microsoft study that found that humans have a natural eight-second attention span – officially shorter than a goldfish. Furthermore, evidence shows that the average office worker switches tasks every three minutes on average, and it is estimated that it takes around ten times the length of the interruption to get back on track. So a two-minute chat with someone who stops by your desk can mean that the report you were writing just took twenty minutes longer. Even a sneaky glance at your inbox for thirty seconds can mean five minutes of lost time. This bombardment of information, the mania induced by trying to cope with it, and the sense that we never really can has been likened to a constant low level feeling of jet lag, or a constant GSA – Gnawing Sense of Anxiety.
Incidentally, as well as being victims of all this, we also have a deep-seated reason to play along. Those little snatches of information that we get in texts, emails and conversations – or even just the possibility of them – tantalise the ancient part of our brains that is primed to look out for them (‘Will that email saying yes to my proposal have arrived?’ ‘Will that guy I fancy in accounts have texted about a coffee?’). Imagine that archetypal tribesman that I referred to in the Introduction, standing on a bluff overlooking the Serengeti. Archaeological and neurological science is certain that our brains are effectively the same as his 40,000-year-old Cro-Magnon one. He didn’t develop to scan several screens, but he did adapt to do something remarkably similar: repeatedly scan the valley below looking for any change – the possibility of an animal to hunt, or a signal of danger, a predator or enemy moving in. Ping! There’s a shadow that could be a lion. Ping! No, it’s a gazelle. Ping! There’s a movement in the trees. Ping! No, it’s just the wind. To make sure we spent time, alert and searching for new information, evolution made sure that we got a little rush of dopamine every time we did spot something new (or even thought we might have). Flitting from activity to activity – what we delusionally and grandly call multitasking – literally gives us a buzz.
Scientists have repeatedly found in studies that multitasking creates a never-ending dopamine feedback loop, and dopamine is a powerful chemical indeed. In laboratory studies conducted by James Olds and Peter Milner in the 1950s, the lab rats got so fixated on getting their dopamine hit that given the choice, they would forego eating, sleeping, nursing their young or resting in favour of hitting a lever that would do nothing except trigger a dopamine release. They did this over and over (and over) again until eventually, they died of exhaustion and starvation. If this sounds too primitive to be relevant to us humans, bear in mind that people have also died, tragically, from playing computer games for too many hours without a break. Glenn Wilson, former Visiting Professor of Psychology at Gresham College in London, claims that multitasking is worse for your cognition than smoking cannabis.
What the evolutionary process certainly hasn’t caught up with is that we now sit on our backsides seeing thousands of potentially titillating bits of new information ping by every day. Plus, of course, our ancient human didn’t have as many other things he was supposed to be getting on with. So, if we are to create the space to concentrate on what we really want to achieve, multitasking is, literally, a drug we have to kick.
*
Tamsin’s frazzled, haphazard working style badly damaged her rapport with her colleagues and the board, and she seemed to be barely coping, constantly dancing on the knife-edge of some sort of disaster. The other big thing Tamsin failed to do amidst all her scurrying around was to get clear on what really mattered. Driven by anxiety and the need to do it all, she failed to get a handle on her own or the company’s goals and priorities.
This is about more than just not being very productive. It’s actually about sleepwalking through life, living less consciously and with far less presence than we have the potential for. I really felt for Tamsin. She had unwittingly recreated the exact situation she was defending herself against; in trying to make herself invaluable by doing it all, she’d actually ended up delivering very little of substance, shot herself in the foot, and then – when crunch time arrived and she had the opportunity to evolve – sadly, she jumped ship. The good news is that life tends to force us to face the same lessons again and again until we learn them, so I have no doubt that sooner or later she will have another opportunity to confront herself – and hopefully choose to learn the deeper lessons.
Not that I blame her. What she was trying to do wasn’t easy. The difficult – and demotivating – truth is that creating space for any of the things we have been discussing is very hard. There is a particular psychological aspect to the idea of focusing and prioritising that makes them extra hard. Without them we can enjoy the fantasy that we can do everything – that we don’t have to choose. Think of the almost physical pain Tamsin went through when I first suggested she start saying no to people. The novelist Stephen King once remarked that writing is hard because you have to ‘kill your darlings’. He didn’t mean killing off a favourite character within the book, but cutting one of his favourite characters out of the book. However much he liked them, and however much he felt the reader might like them, if they weren’t essential to the plot, out they would go. Activities inessential to the plot you’ve set for your life should go the same way. Only then have you got the best chance of authoring your own happy ending.
There is a profound truth in Nike’s annoyingly simple aphorism: regardless of how many tips, tricks, tactics or strategies you employ, sooner or later you do have to just sit down and ‘do it’. Or as Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief of Vogue, puts it: ‘Leadership is coming up with an idea and executing it. Ideas are a dime a dozen.’ Prioritising, planning and preparing can only take you so far. Whatever your position – even if you are in a role that primarily involves managing other people – in today’s knowledge and ideas economy, we all have long, long lists of things to do. At some point, the report has to be written; those emails (as annoying, numerous and never-ending as they are) need to be sent; that proposal to be sent out; the agreement has to be reviewed.
Creating the space – physical, temporal, psychic and relational – to do our work is an essential prerequisite to actually doing it. Again, creating space must come first. Without some kind of deliberate intervention by us, many of us would find our days full of reactive ‘busy’ work such as answering one email after another, saying yes to every favour or request asked of us, being unable to concentrate and getting sucked into endlessly fascinating distractions. Reviewing and addressing the four kinds of space in order to set ourselves up to be productive is an essential part of self-leadership. Each of these will call to mind the exploration we undertook in Part One around Creating Space to think, but this time our focus is not on thinking but doing.
What we are trying to discover is which approaches, rhythms and habits are the right ones for you. ‘Taking Care of Business’, as Elvis Presley called it (it’s emblazoned on the tailfin of his plane at Graceland), is largely dependent on knowing ourselves, and creating daily and weekly plans that work with rather than push against our rhythms, energy levels, commitments and deadlines. Too often advice on getting things done assumes that people are similar. My experience of working with hundreds of executives is that people are incredibly diverse, as we noted when looking at how people like best to reflect and learn in Part 1. Rather than offer a ‘one size fits all’ solution, let’s explore various aspects of getting things done and you can consider which one best fits your own preferences. Though, it’s worth adding, it can be interesting – and productive – to experiment and try out a different modus operandi now and again, just to see what happens. For example, maybe you are not someone who takes regular breaks, but what would you find out if you did? Maybe you don’t feel a need to plan out your day – but what would doing so feel like, if you tried it for a week?
Many people who work from home complain that they struggle to get work done there because of the blurred boundary between their work day and their home environment; there’s always a wash load that needs doing, some personal paperwork to file or a cupboard that needs cleaning out. But working in an office often isn’t much better; there are endless rabbit holes to fall down or conversations and projects to be pulled into. It’s remarkably easy to fill a day with busy work, but fail to move the needle in any significant way on an important project. This challenge echoes the one we addressed in Part 1, when we looked at creating space to think. Most offices are pretty poorly designed when it comes to actually getting work done. Open-plan spaces and open-door policies allow anyone to interrupt you at any time and can make it very hard to get ‘in the zone’ – and the zone is where we want to be working. Being distracted by interruptions from colleagues or from overhearing office gossip rank very highly in any list of productivity killers in the workplace. You might not be able to redesign your workspace, but there are some things you can consider, such as working with noise-cancelling headphones on for a ‘Power Hour’ and listening to ambient background noise, or working a few hours a week in a different part of the office such as a designated quiet zone, meeting room or even in a café. Do what you can to set your environment up to support you in working well.
Also pay attention to the productivity sapping potential of meetings. These can give the illusion of productivity, but often become centred on discussions and debates about what could be being done rather than on what is being done – and by whom. We’re all familiar with the soul-destroying potential of meetings to simply result in more meetings.
I once worked with a big infrastructure company who were trying to break out of a cycle of too many meetings. The first thing we did was work out how much the meetings were costing. If you added up both the salaries people were paid and how much they were supposed to be contributing to revenue, some regular yet rather listless meetings were actually costing thousands of pounds each, not to mention the cost in lost motivation. We then looked at what the meetings were for. The company, rightly, didn’t want to lose the connection and relationship-building that occurred at meetings, so some meetings were kept, with that as an implicit if not explicit purpose. But lots of status meetings were moved onto zoom (similar to Skype), enabling people at their desks or on their mobiles to achieve in fifteen minutes what used to take an hour.
The CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, is known for her ability to conduct up to seventy micro-meetings per week. Mayer’s approach trains people to value her time as well as their own, not to waste it, to plan ahead and be extremely clear about what they need from her. Other CEOs I know have ten-minute meetings scheduled one after the other in blocks of time on certain mornings, and some do these standing up. In just a few hours they can connect with twenty people, and each feels they have had real ‘facetime’. You should also think consciously about the frequency and length of meetings you are involved in, as these have a real impact on the space you have to actually do things.
The same goes for our digital environment. The average worker receives over a hundred emails a day (and rising), and many of us work in cultures where those emails are expected to be answered within minutes or hours. There’s a shared expectation nowadays that if someone asks us a question or needs something from us, we owe them a reply ASAP – regardless of any effect on us. Taking charge of this by setting clear expectations about your availability, perhaps via an email autoresponder or in conversation with relevant colleagues or stakeholders, will help free up much-needed space to get work done.
A discussion of creating space to work would not be complete without mentioning smart phones. It is hardly surprising that numerous studies have found that phones have a hugely detrimental effect on our ability to get work done. According to a survey by Open Market, 83 per cent of millennials open text messages within ninety seconds of receiving them. This isn’t surprising given what we know about the pleasure-boosting effects of a dopamine hit, but it can create very real problems in terms of focusing on complex and/or creative work that requires ‘deep’ attention. The lure of a quick feel-good burst of dopamine can have us opening new emails, answering text messages or scrolling on our preferred social media channel of choice (again), all ultimately at the cost of doing something truly productive.
A study by Career Builders found that mobile phones and text messages surpassed even emails as the biggest productivity drain at work, with three out of four employers saying that two or more hours a day were lost in productivity because employees are distracted. Forty-three per cent reported at least three hours a day being lost. When asked to name the biggest productivity killers in the workplace (respondents could give more than one answer), 55 per cent said mobiles and texting, 41 per cent said the internet and 39 per cent said gossip. Social media came in fourth with 37 per cent, followed by co-workers dropping by at 27 per cent, with smoke breaks or snack breaks also at 27 per cent, email at 26 per cent and meetings at 24 per cent. These numbers give a powerful indication of the kind of things that are stopping work from getting done.
It isn’t just the time spent on the phone that we lose. A study at Florida State University in 2013 found that the probability of making an error increased 28 per cent after getting a phone call and 23 per cent after receiving a text. That’s fine, you might think. ‘I don’t answer my texts immediately, and I don’t always pick up the phone.’ That’s all well and good, but as research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance reported, people who just received a notification about a call were found to be three times more likely to make an error in their task – even if they didn’t answer it! I think the solution here is pretty simple: when you sit down to work, put your phone out of sight, on flight mode or do not disturb mode. The difference between the two is that flight mode disconnects your phone from being able to send or receive calls, so voicemails, texts and any app notifications will come through in a flurry once you turn flight mode off; in ‘do not disturb’ mode, however, texts and calls will still come in, but the phone will not alert you about these. The caveat to using do not disturb mode instead of flight mode is that you must have your phone face down or stashed away somewhere, otherwise you’ll see any incoming communications flash up on the screen. If your phone is nearby, it’s very tempting just to pick it up and check a few apps. A small act of self-discipline here can work wonders on your productivity levels. Put your phone away and see for yourself if you get more stuff done.
The same obviously goes for browsing on your laptop, desktop computer or tablet. I suspect there is a very high correlation between poor levels of productivity and a high number of open tabs on your browser. Not only does this slow your computer down, but every extra tab sends your brain the message that there’s something else vying for your attention, something incomplete or more interesting than the thing you’re working on. Indeed, work offline wherever possible. Similarly, if you habitually open a new tab and hit ‘f’ for Facebook, and you notice yourself doing this when you ought to be in the zone with work, you could play with using an internet restriction app to force your own hand. One of the best known of these apps is Freedom, created by Fred Stutzman while completing his PhD. Freedom takes you completely offline for up to eight hours. If that is a little too extreme, there are other options such as Anti Social, SelfControl, Cold Turkey and StayFocusd. Some of these apps force you to commit to a schedule, which, as we explore next, can be a profoundly simple way to reshape and transform your working day.
This mirrors our discussion around creating space to think in Part 1. Creating temporal space to do can feel equally challenging, especially if your calendar is full of meetings and appointments. Even (in fact especially) if you face a lot of demands on your time that you can’t control, you need to have an iron grip on the time you can control. Which makes planning your day essential. Here are seven ideas which you should consider as you create and refine your own pOS and find your unique, optimal way of creating space to do.
First up is structuring your week, which you should consider before you plan your day. Some people like to have broadly similar days; others like to separate out, as far as they can, different days for different tasks. This second approach is advocated by Dan Sullivan in his Entrepreneurial Time Management System. It involves planning three types of day into your week: buffer days, where you churn through the myriad smaller items that need doing; rest days, which some people suggest are best spent screen free; and focus days, where you move the needle on big projects. This is pretty much how I tend to work, attempting whenever I can to have a different rhythm to my Wednesdays, even being a little fallow if at all possible. This seems to punctuate the week for me and give me the energy and motivation to end the week with a bang rather than petering out, which I think is what most people tend to do – ‘casual Friday’, in many workplaces being not just about what you wear. I am aware of how lucky I am to have this level of control over my week.
Next is reflecting on each day. One helpful way to create temporal space is, ironically, to take some time – roughly ten minutes – at the end of each working day to review and reflect on what you achieved, what is incomplete, what you delayed or delegated, and what needs doing the following day. That way, when you arrive at your desk the following morning, you do not have to try to figure out the day ahead – it’s already mapped out for you, and you can tweak and alter if necessary. I always think it’s easier to work with something rather than face a blank canvas, especially first thing in the morning when our brains haven’t fully kicked into gear! Of course some people prefer to write such a list at the start of the day; as with all of these things, what will suit you is something only you can determine.
Some time management advice insists that morning is the best time for creativity, and for getting ‘bigger’ pieces of work done. Productivity experts advocate eating the frog first thing in the morning, in other words getting the hardest, biggest or most important thing out of the way first. Don’t ease into your day with a bit of social media or a bit of emailing; hit the ground running and tackle the thing that you really don’t want to do. You’ll feel great afterwards and it will free up a lot of headspace. Peter Drucker described these as big rocks, using the analogy of filling a glass jar with big rocks before you add in pebbles, sand and water. Put any of those other three things in first – smaller tasks, quick actions or emails – and the danger is that you will find that there is little space left for the big rocks, those more demanding and complex chunks of work that really require your peak energy and attention.
Research and my experience of clients suggest that this is true, but only for most people, not for everybody. I know of one very successful executive who feels they need a long, slow start to the day, so he does minor pieces of work first before ‘revving up’ to do the complex stuff in the late afternoon. As ever, each to their own.
The fourth idea is the one I introduced to Tamsin – blocking out time. This is a way of organising your day and your work by splitting them into a series of themed time blocks. It’s the daily version of the approach to the week outlined above. Multiple studies have proven that we are able to do focused work with good levels of creativity, attention and accuracy for anything from 20–90 minutes. Working in twenty minute blocks is known as the Pomodoro Technique, a very popular time management strategy wherein you set a timer for twenty minutes, work on one thing during that time, and then take a five-minute break, before rinsing and repeating. This means for every hour worked, you take a ten-minute break (sort of like a therapist’s 50-minute hour). For some people, twenty minutes isn’t long enough to really get into their groove; they prefer to work for half an hour, forty-five minutes or even longer before taking a break. The longest time recommended for working without a pause is an hour and a half, but I have known people get their head down and only emerge after a whole day has gone by. As always, find out what works for you, but don’t be afraid to experiment along the way.
It’s important to vary your pace. Working in time blocks helps you see the day as a series of short sprints rather than a marathon, but – as in sport itself – most of us can manage the latter better than the former. In an interview for Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz, a productivity expert who co-developed the idea of the ‘Corporate Athlete’, expands on this idea:
Most of us mistakenly assume we’re meant to run like computers – at high speeds, continuously, for long periods of time, running multiple programs simultaneously. It’s just not true. Human beings are designed to be rhythmic. The heart pulses; muscles contract and relax. We’re at our best when we’re moving rhythmically between spending energy and renewing it. We need to recognize the insight of athletes, who manage their work-rest ratios.
The lesson? Work intensely, then take a break and recover. Work solidly all day and you may well find yourself consistently outperformed and outdone by a colleague who works in short, intense stints with regular breaks in between. To adapt the fable, this is less a choice between being either the tortoise or the hare, and more a case of finding a way to be sometimes one and then the other.
Another aspect of time blocking involves grouping similar tasks together and tackling them all in one go. Known as batching your tasks, this technique reduces the amount of work your brain needs to do to switch tasks. Instead of entering one expense receipt, then reading one report, then answering one voicemail, the idea is that you save them up and do all the tasks in the same category together.
The last idea for helping create space to do involves breaking things down. It’s easy to confuse a task with a project. Anytime you find yourself resisting or procrastinating on a task, try breaking it down into smaller components. Tree surgeons don’t cut entire trees down, they tackle one branch at a time, then move onto the trunk, which sometimes gets chopped down in multiple pieces too. It’s tempting to think that you need to create hours and hours of space to get something done and find yourself consistently not being able to do that; a solution might be to break the project down into various tasks and to create the space to tackle one of these at a time.
If I am having a standard day in the office, my preference is to write first thing (assessment reports, proposals etc.) and then do other activities later in the day (meetings, admin etc.). I usually then have a mini-burst of energy in the late afternoon that allows me to get two or three smaller, but still significant, chunks of work done (a more complex email reply, revising a document etc.). My concentration will really start to flag after ninety minutes, so I then have a break, or at least a change in routine. Even a five-minute stretch and walking around can do the trick.
The crucial thing is to create the space that ensures your preferred schedule ends up being your actual schedule. Be bold in blocking out your diary and saying no, or at least push back strongly on requests that don’t fit in with your plan. There will always be exceptions, but the aim is to keep these at a minimum. If I’m not delivering client work, a typical day for me might look like this.
Of course, the demands of your own job and your own individual preferences will be different to mine. But what does your ideal day look like? Do you even know? If you don’t know, or fail even to try and achieve it on most days, then you are letting everyone else decide for you. You’ve allowed them, literally, to steal your space.
ASK YOURSELF: What is my plan for using my most valuable resource – my time? Could I experiment with doing it differently to see what happened?
There are many ways in which other people will influence what you do, the way you do things and how you do them. This is an area that we explored in Part 2, where we looked at how the Spirits Team worked together; we will look at it again in the next story when we look at Space to Lead and delivering through and with others.
It’s very important that as well as doing all the aforementioned external things to create space to deliver you also create space internally, to nurture the right mindset. This involves three overlapping areas that you need to explore and master: prioritisation, accountability and expectations.
Prioritisation is the ability to decide – decisively and ruthlessly – what it is you are making space to do. It is linked to the choosing of goals, which we looked at in the last chapter, but it is more than just that. Most people’s work involves more than their chosen goals and includes the multiple demands of others and having to deal with events as they unfold. Accountability is the mindset and behaviour that drives you forward, as you hold yourself responsible for persisting, and for overcoming obstacles. Expectations relate to how you manage the demands of others, while maintaining the space you need and preserving the trust of your colleagues.
Mastering prioritisation – the religion of success
The Labour Party politician Nye Bevan once asserted that: ‘The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.’ I believe that the language of priorities is the religion of success. Given our society’s love of ‘priorities’, it’s an interesting fact that when the word entered the English language in the 1400s it was used in singular form only, and stayed that way for the next 500 years. Only in the last couple of centuries did we start talking about having more than one priority, which led us to here – a time when we juggle multiple and often conflicting priorities. It is vital, if you are to truly lead, to create enough head-space to be able to distinguish what is important from what is urgent. The former truly matters; the latter matters right now, but also leaves you on the back foot, working reactively instead of creatively, a passenger on the journey rather than the one behind the wheel.
Understanding and deploying your resources are the key here. I am assuming that you are not someone who has loads of spare time to fill up with new tasks but that, on the contrary, you already feel pushed and pulled in all directions. So the resources you allocate to your strategy come at a price; they have an opportunity cost. If you allocate more resources to your own personal goal, then you’ll have less of those things – time, energy, freedom, money – to devote to something else. (I say money because sometimes it’s possible to sacrifice immediate reward for longer term reward. For example, when I was writing this book, I made sure that the consultancy I founded was commercially successful, but I consciously accepted that we would only grow to an extent, putting our bigger business development and expansion plans on hold until the book was done. I would have loved to have done both, and was sorely tempted to delude myself that I could. But I couldn’t. So I didn’t. I made the sacrifice that David Ogilvy was talking about.)
Lying behind such prioritisation is something that people feel uncomfortable about, but which is important to name and address. I’m talking about the idea of being ruthless – even a bit selfish. Not all the time and not in the way you are with others, but some of the time, and with how you are with yourself. You need to see yourself as the ‘CEO of you’. Your job is to deploy your resources in the way that adds most value.
ASK YOURSELF: Have I got a clear sense of my priorities? Are they realistic or wishful thinking? Have I been ruthless enough?
Once you have sorted your priorities you can think about how to itemise and track the elements of what you have to do. Here, again, a person’s own preferences come into play. What is absolutely universal, however, is the need to have a clear, prioritised ‘to-do’ list. Keeping things in your head, or on different scraps of paper is doomed to let you and others down. I have tried various methods (including apps), but find the simplest and most effective way to keep track of what I have to do is to put a TO-DO list in my calendar at the time when I will be doing such tasks. Critical tasks are coloured red, less critical ones orange. Anything not done at that time is carried over to a new slot.
The point of telling you all this is not that you should necessarily adopt the same system, but to illustrate the essential elements of whatever system you choose to use, which are: it’s all in one place; it’s easily accessible; it’s easily amended; it involves a clear hierarchy.
To help you evolve a system that works best for you, here is the well-known 4D rule of time management that underpins my own process of prioritisation: DO, DEFER, DELEGATE, DROP.
Most people I begin working with allow far too many things to end up in the DO category. Indeed, many of them exist in a weird state where they never, ever actually DO all of the things they have supposedly ‘decided’ to DO. Now, in any other sphere of life this would be ridiculous. If you decided that a certain recipe needed ten ingredients you wouldn’t just chuck half of them in and hope for the best. The bar for DO should be set very high. It should be the absolutely essential things that only you can do in order to realise your professional and personal strategy. Again, to stretch the cooking metaphor, you don’t add extraneous stuff into your recipe either. You only have what really needs to be there.
Sometimes there are things that you need to do, but can’t do now or in the near future, hence DEFER. But beware of this category, as it can be an easy option for avoiding tough decisions. There shouldn’t be too many DEFER items and they should be regularly reviewed. If after, say, a fortnight, a particular item hasn’t made it to your DO list then either DELEGATE it or DROP it (or put it on a separate long term ideas list). In short, don’t pretend you’re going to do something just because you don’t feel comfortable dropping it. This is what makes this hard. If you were just culling stuff that is pointless or irrelevant that would be really easy. But those things don’t tend to appear on even the longest to-do lists. In reality, we tend to have lots of things we’d like TO DO, but if they are not wholly necessary for your chosen goal(s), DROP them.
I assume you have some sort of to-do list even if it’s on a scrap of paper at the bottom of your laptop bag. Get it out now and go through it. Mark each item DO, DEFER, DELEGATE or DROP. Now look at those DOs and really ask yourself whether they need to be done immediately, because they are essential to your chosen goals. If not, re-categorise them. Now take another look at your list. There, at last you have an actual TO-DO list.
ASK YOURSELF: Do I have a clear sense of what I need to do now? Next? This week? This month? This year? Am I driving what appears on these lists or is someone else, or even worse, no-one, I’m just on auto-pilot?
Mastering accountability – it’s my responsibility
Accountability comprises three things: taking complete ownership; communicating with clarity; being reliable and trustworthy.
This is such an important area that it is one of the twelve attributes that indicate high potential in the DEEP model of potential (discussed on p. 64). Being accountable is first and foremost about adopting a mindset in which you commit to taking absolute personal responsibility for yourself; your work; your contribution to the teams and projects you’re involved in; as well as the overall business. This means working from a stance of internal personal leadership – regardless of your role or level of responsibility in any external hierarchy. Someone who’s truly embodying accountability won’t wait for it to come from another person.
There are a number of clear, observable behaviours that go along with accountability. Being accountable is about being trustworthy and reliable, and this happens over time, not overnight. In order to be accountable, you need to maintain ongoing awareness of what’s on your plate, what’s booked in your calendar and what others expect of you. It also requires making space to reflect, evaluate and plan ahead. Ultimately, it’s about doing the right thing regardless of whether you’re a lone voice in a crowd. When something goes wrong, accountability means ‘me first’. Being truly accountable means looking at oneself before addressing the faults of others, especially when you’re in a leadership position. You can’t expect from your team what you won’t deliver as a leader, and you can’t take your team further than you’ve gone yourself.
ASK YOURSELF: Do I do what I say I’m going to do, when I’m going to do it? Do I walk my talk?
Mastering expectations – under-promise and over-deliver
A key aspect of execution involves setting expectations, especially in today’s increasingly networked world. Very few of us are lone workers, and it makes a lot of sense to create clarity at the outset with clients, colleagues and other stakeholders. At the beginning of any project or task in which you are involved, initiate a conversation with the relevant person (or people) to formalise exactly what is expected of whom and by when. Set expectations around what you can do, and by when, that are realistic and take into account your other work and priorities. As and when things change, communicate this promptly and responsibly. If you don’t have clarity, or suspect that there is an ‘expectation gap,’ then take the necessary action to close that gap. Take the reins rather than waiting for others to tell you what is required or expected of you.
These conversations become the basis of your accountability agreements with everyone you work with and will ensure that their hopeful and often unspoken expectations are converted into trust. If you are unsure or unconfident in how to broach this, practise by writing out a draft email or mentally rehearsing the conversation.
And beware of scope creep. Once you’ve said yes to something, watch out for people adding things on top of their original request. Just because you said yes to one thing doesn’t mean you have to say yes to everything.
Before you negotiate deadlines, however, bear in mind the following: projects, commitments and tasks often expand to fill the amount of time available to complete them – even if we apply our best efforts to be disciplined. We tend to be optimists, underestimating how long something is going to take. Even if we are quite clear on what something requires from us, we often forget to factor in things beyond our control – other people, their schedules and level of involvement, and so on. We might end up needing to pull an all-nighter, or having to push back a deadline (which may have a knock-on effect on those around us), or submitting incomplete work. None of these are ideal, and they are all often (but not always) avoidable.
An executive I coached called Samira swears by the mantra, ‘under-promise and over-deliver’. She estimates how long something will take and then adds another 30–40 per cent when negotiating deadlines. ‘I felt uncomfortable when I started using this technique,’ she told me. ‘I thought it would make me look slow and lacking in drive, especially compared to colleagues who promise to get things done asap. But I soon realised it was better to set realistic expectations than have the horrible feeling of delaying delivery of a project. Plus I may finish earlier than my deadline, which makes everyone feel good and ahead of schedule.’
Think about the number of projects – in your workplace, your personal life and in the news – that have been beset by delays and setbacks. Whether it’s a high speed railway service, home repairs or a product launch, delays are often so common that we sigh in unsurprised resignation, not acknowledging that by creating space at the outset, we could have created a different way of experiencing the situation, even if none of the external circumstances changed. The point is that we fail to factor in the unexpected, and by doing so, we set ourselves up to feel rushed and be late. Creating space in this way isn’t just good for your reputation, it’s also good for your physiology and health, since you end up being much less stressed.
Navigating your way around all this isn’t easy. I work regularly with a FTSE 50 company that is known for pushing its people hard. A while ago I was working with two members of their high-pressure commercial team, let’s call them Sally and Fiona. When I talked to their boss his feedback was brutal. First we discussed Sally.
‘Sally’s going to work herself into an early grave, I fear for her marriage. When does she ever see her kid for God’s sake? If you ask her to boil the ocean she’d ask what you wanted her to do with the leftover salt. She’s got to learn to say no.’ We then moved on to Fiona. ‘She’d better watch herself. She’s getting a reputation for ducking hard work. She sent an email to the big boss last week saying I can do x and y but not z. Who the hell does she think she is?’
I knew the boss well enough to point out the contradiction: ‘What you want, then, is a perfect mix of Sally and Fiona?’ He at least had the good grace to laugh, but then he made a serious point. Sally was being too indiscriminate, but Fiona was being too discriminate. The balance was, truly, somewhere in the middle. ‘Besides,’ he added revealingly, ‘who tells someone so senior you’re not going to do what they want? You just nod and then do the important stuff and assume they’ll forget the stuff that wasn’t.’
ASK YOURSELF: Did I communicate the expectations clearly? Did I include the right people in the conversation? What could I have done differently? Where were my blind spots?
These three areas of mastery – prioritisation, accountability and expectations – take us neatly to the next area where we need to create space. If and when we become leaders, we have to take these skills on to a whole new level, so we can create the space to lead.