7 questions to ask yourself before committing to anything
I should subtitle this as: "learning to say no". I'll explain.
I was put into an interesting position earlier this week, I was asked to commit to doing a piece of work for the next 5 weeks, starting in 2 days time. This task would most likely take up a good 20-30 hours of my working week.
"That's not a problem", I hear you say, "I'm sure you could juggle things around to make that fit".
Well, that was the other problem, it's also a nice problem to have, being asked to help out on more things, but there comes a time when you have reached maximum capacity and you need to identify that, otherwise what you'll end up delivering for other people is going to be of lower quality than what you want it to be. Sure, for some people this might be okay, do a lot more things, drop the quality a bit, it's no problem, someone else will pick up the slack,etc...etc...
That doesn't work for me. If I commit, I'm all in. Call it a personality issue, a psychological trait, something that I need to resolve from my childhood, whatever... the point is, if I take something on, I want to make sure that it has my full focus. My view is to switch it around. If I ask someone to do something for me, I expect (my missus would probably say, I would "demand" ;-) ) that they do what I've asked and to the depth of what I've asked.
If I ask someone to help work on one of my cars, or to help decorate a room by painting it, I don't expect the to turn up every now and then, fiddle around with a few things, do a half-a$$ed job and then say, "ta da, all done, I'm off now". leaving me to pick up the pieces, clean up the mess and pretty much end up re-doing the job again myself (cos I'm a perfectionist, don't you know...not).
Back to my problem above. I'm already working on 2 projects during the working week. I'm juggling handling both by making sure I have a clear definition of the activities that are needed, what tasks are required, what the dependencies there are and what the risks are. I also work out who I am reliant upon for certain tasks and what their track record has been, are they early, on time, usually late on delivery, also what is their experience? will they require longer to do a task as this is their first time? or it's out of their comfort-zone? will I be required to do some hand-holding and mentoring to get them along their journey, before I can do my piece?
All these things are eating up that one commodity that is the rarest of them all....TIME.
If I work it out, I'm paid to do a 37hour week, yes, shock!horror! wow, that's amazing, only 37hours. When was the last time I worked a 37hour week? I'd say, probably around 20years ago!
The reality is, it's usually a 40hour week, with a few hours extra here and there, so let's roll it up to 45hours a week. Now, juggling 2 projects that are similar but very different means doing some interesting time-slicing, I worked out that I could "assist" by providing "guidance" on the 2nd project, so long as I wasn't committed to any deliverables. Well, let's just say that didn't last long, I was on the hook for delivering some rather complex work, that if I were not me, I would have just banged out in a week, thrown it over the fence and said, "yep, that's good enough, get going".
However, I'm annoying. Let's say, I needed to process 60,000 things, I chose to take a small sample to get going, like 10/20/30 to then prove everything was doing what it should and resolving oddities that weren't doing what they should. Then ramping up to 100, then 1000 noticing a 0.1% failure rate, which isn't bad, but not good when ramping up to 60,000... As I say, if I need to and if time dictates, then I would accept that level of failure and would push the thing live (btw - this is not about automated driving of cars or auto-piloting / controlling a helicopter, but that is potentially my flaw, I treat all of my work like that, I recall a manager in my past once asking, "is anyone going to die just because you have a few bugs/errors in the code?".... the answer at the time was "yes", but at this moment, it's not about dying, it's about accuracy, that was more important, the accuracy needs to be as high as it can be)
So, being asked to commit to another 20-30hours of work was nice...but I had to make the tough call and reply, "sorry, but no". Oh, that went down well. Like a lead balloon.
I was escalated, as that's what happens. I stated my case and I think the penny then dropped. What do we actually want this guy to do for us? If I hadn't have stood back and assessed this (like the 7 questions), then I would have put myself and everyone else involved into a false sense of security that I could dedicate and commit to doing this extra work, when I knew in my heart I could not.
I went for the painful option of saying, "no", up-front. Yes, it's hard and I'll probably have some mental marker put against my name somewhere, but, I seriously hope that it is understood why I made the decision I did. If, in the future, I were "on the bench" (wow! haven't had that luxury since about 2005!) then sure I would have embraced the opportunity to help out, 'cos that's what I do.
But, I hear you recoil and ask, "But Tony, you are such a high-level ranking person in your company, why are you doing manual tasks that involve rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty, aren't there a whole load of youngsters that can do that work?". Well, firstly my response to that would be too impolite for me to put in writing.
<rant>I'll save the real rant for another time, but, if you've "risen" to such lofty heights that you "don't do the work anymore", then, in all honesty, what use are you? you're just admin. you'll demand the salary of a CTO/CEO, but really you are just admin, you can arm-flap, wave your hands about, draw a few boxes on a whiteboard, but you can't really "do" anything anymore. Also, unless you're really good, your knowledge is also out of date in 6 months, okay, some things will always be the same in IT, so experience and knowledge of that will help. But, if you cannot flip your laptop around and show me your screen and have "at least" 1 IDE open doing some form of coding, then I'm sorry, but you're in the wrong job, go and work in marketing or sales. </rant>
The moral of this is: think before you act, pause, take a breathe, take a moment, consider the outcomes, run through the possibilities and risks. Then act.
If you read between the lines above, I obviously said, "yes", to the 7 questions earlier in the year, hence I'm working on 2 full time projects at the same time. I made the decision to commit to this, I went through the "7 questions" and the answers worked for me. However, doing it again, the answers weren't going to work for me, I chose to pass. I'm sure someone else will pick up the work and do a really good job of it. I don't need to take the credit for everything!
What this has all concluded is that I need to have an application to assist me, to help me to scientifically work out if indeed I am able to take on extra tasks and to then calculate when best to fit that into the working week.
Naturally, this will have to have some A.I. in the equation, so that it is learning from any previous bad choices or decisions that didn't work out, it would also be great if it could work out predictive information such as, "you've been operating at this velocity for X period of time, you need to reduce your workload down by x% for y% of time and then you can look to increase it again by i% after j% of time for a duration of...", you get the point.
This would be an awesome product wouldn't it. I'd buy it. In fact, I wonder if I have any spare time to make such a product myself.......
btw - I agree that the 7 questions listed above don't always make sense and you could draw up a slightly different list, but they are mostly correct for the context of being asked to assist with doing something.
I was put into an interesting position earlier this week, I was asked to commit to doing a piece of work for the next 5 weeks, starting in 2 days time. This task would most likely take up a good 20-30 hours of my working week.
"That's not a problem", I hear you say, "I'm sure you could juggle things around to make that fit".
Well, that was the other problem, it's also a nice problem to have, being asked to help out on more things, but there comes a time when you have reached maximum capacity and you need to identify that, otherwise what you'll end up delivering for other people is going to be of lower quality than what you want it to be. Sure, for some people this might be okay, do a lot more things, drop the quality a bit, it's no problem, someone else will pick up the slack,etc...etc...
That doesn't work for me. If I commit, I'm all in. Call it a personality issue, a psychological trait, something that I need to resolve from my childhood, whatever... the point is, if I take something on, I want to make sure that it has my full focus. My view is to switch it around. If I ask someone to do something for me, I expect (my missus would probably say, I would "demand" ;-) ) that they do what I've asked and to the depth of what I've asked.
If I ask someone to help work on one of my cars, or to help decorate a room by painting it, I don't expect the to turn up every now and then, fiddle around with a few things, do a half-a$$ed job and then say, "ta da, all done, I'm off now". leaving me to pick up the pieces, clean up the mess and pretty much end up re-doing the job again myself (cos I'm a perfectionist, don't you know...not).
Back to my problem above. I'm already working on 2 projects during the working week. I'm juggling handling both by making sure I have a clear definition of the activities that are needed, what tasks are required, what the dependencies there are and what the risks are. I also work out who I am reliant upon for certain tasks and what their track record has been, are they early, on time, usually late on delivery, also what is their experience? will they require longer to do a task as this is their first time? or it's out of their comfort-zone? will I be required to do some hand-holding and mentoring to get them along their journey, before I can do my piece?
All these things are eating up that one commodity that is the rarest of them all....TIME.
If I work it out, I'm paid to do a 37hour week, yes, shock!horror! wow, that's amazing, only 37hours. When was the last time I worked a 37hour week? I'd say, probably around 20years ago!
The reality is, it's usually a 40hour week, with a few hours extra here and there, so let's roll it up to 45hours a week. Now, juggling 2 projects that are similar but very different means doing some interesting time-slicing, I worked out that I could "assist" by providing "guidance" on the 2nd project, so long as I wasn't committed to any deliverables. Well, let's just say that didn't last long, I was on the hook for delivering some rather complex work, that if I were not me, I would have just banged out in a week, thrown it over the fence and said, "yep, that's good enough, get going".
However, I'm annoying. Let's say, I needed to process 60,000 things, I chose to take a small sample to get going, like 10/20/30 to then prove everything was doing what it should and resolving oddities that weren't doing what they should. Then ramping up to 100, then 1000 noticing a 0.1% failure rate, which isn't bad, but not good when ramping up to 60,000... As I say, if I need to and if time dictates, then I would accept that level of failure and would push the thing live (btw - this is not about automated driving of cars or auto-piloting / controlling a helicopter, but that is potentially my flaw, I treat all of my work like that, I recall a manager in my past once asking, "is anyone going to die just because you have a few bugs/errors in the code?".... the answer at the time was "yes", but at this moment, it's not about dying, it's about accuracy, that was more important, the accuracy needs to be as high as it can be)
So, being asked to commit to another 20-30hours of work was nice...but I had to make the tough call and reply, "sorry, but no". Oh, that went down well. Like a lead balloon.
I was escalated, as that's what happens. I stated my case and I think the penny then dropped. What do we actually want this guy to do for us? If I hadn't have stood back and assessed this (like the 7 questions), then I would have put myself and everyone else involved into a false sense of security that I could dedicate and commit to doing this extra work, when I knew in my heart I could not.
I went for the painful option of saying, "no", up-front. Yes, it's hard and I'll probably have some mental marker put against my name somewhere, but, I seriously hope that it is understood why I made the decision I did. If, in the future, I were "on the bench" (wow! haven't had that luxury since about 2005!) then sure I would have embraced the opportunity to help out, 'cos that's what I do.
But, I hear you recoil and ask, "But Tony, you are such a high-level ranking person in your company, why are you doing manual tasks that involve rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty, aren't there a whole load of youngsters that can do that work?". Well, firstly my response to that would be too impolite for me to put in writing.
<rant>I'll save the real rant for another time, but, if you've "risen" to such lofty heights that you "don't do the work anymore", then, in all honesty, what use are you? you're just admin. you'll demand the salary of a CTO/CEO, but really you are just admin, you can arm-flap, wave your hands about, draw a few boxes on a whiteboard, but you can't really "do" anything anymore. Also, unless you're really good, your knowledge is also out of date in 6 months, okay, some things will always be the same in IT, so experience and knowledge of that will help. But, if you cannot flip your laptop around and show me your screen and have "at least" 1 IDE open doing some form of coding, then I'm sorry, but you're in the wrong job, go and work in marketing or sales. </rant>
The moral of this is: think before you act, pause, take a breathe, take a moment, consider the outcomes, run through the possibilities and risks. Then act.
If you read between the lines above, I obviously said, "yes", to the 7 questions earlier in the year, hence I'm working on 2 full time projects at the same time. I made the decision to commit to this, I went through the "7 questions" and the answers worked for me. However, doing it again, the answers weren't going to work for me, I chose to pass. I'm sure someone else will pick up the work and do a really good job of it. I don't need to take the credit for everything!
What this has all concluded is that I need to have an application to assist me, to help me to scientifically work out if indeed I am able to take on extra tasks and to then calculate when best to fit that into the working week.
Naturally, this will have to have some A.I. in the equation, so that it is learning from any previous bad choices or decisions that didn't work out, it would also be great if it could work out predictive information such as, "you've been operating at this velocity for X period of time, you need to reduce your workload down by x% for y% of time and then you can look to increase it again by i% after j% of time for a duration of...", you get the point.
This would be an awesome product wouldn't it. I'd buy it. In fact, I wonder if I have any spare time to make such a product myself.......
btw - I agree that the 7 questions listed above don't always make sense and you could draw up a slightly different list, but they are mostly correct for the context of being asked to assist with doing something.
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