Development work is stressful. Developers and development managers usually hope their work circumstances will magically change for them. They might not necessarily have the knowledge, experience, motivation or desire to proactively or passively improve their own day to day work situation. Instead of simply waiting and hoping for luck to change your circumstance, you need to become a manager or developer who proactively changes things and makes a positive difference.
Action is the foundational key for all success.
- Pablo Picasso
If you feel overwhelmed with your ticket queue or your workload, which you will, pause, take a breathe, assess the situation and choose the task that will have the biggest impact. Make that task your main focus. After you finish that task move on to the next highest impact task then the next and so on. As you start working like this you will gain clarity, confidence and that feeling of being overwhelmed will dissipate slowly, but surely.
You need to take action. Start your workday by defining your top priorities. Better, still, define your top priorities the night before. This way you prep yourself the day before for what you are planning to accomplish tomorrow. Otherwise, you run the risk of getting distracted. You could get sucked into email or your attention diverted by some other task when you start your day. Know your daily goals. You can confirm or reassess by checking your priority list, let it be your compass to orientate your day.
Avoid defining more than 5 priorities for your day. With more than 5 priorities you risk losing focus by trying to do too much. Remember, change will take time, effort and consistency. You'll need to narrow focus and put in all your energy toward addressing your priority list daily. Chip away at your list each and every day. Show up each day motivated to tackle items on your list.
Become a person of action
The future depends on what you do today.
- Mahatma Gandh
You need to train yourself to become a person who does highly influential work and solves critical problems. Your motivation should be to improve the lives of your users. It doesn't matter if your users are internal or external, and ideally they are both. Every moment not spent on trying to make meaningful, positive impact is time lost. You can never have that time back and instead of working toward making your future better, you've gone nowhere. In reality you've actually made your future worse by not moving forward in the right direction. Even if it's 1 step in the right direction, it's progress toward making things better. If you frame you work day like this, every moment spent leaves you better off than you were before you started your day.
So how do you start to become a person of action? Start by auditing your time. Find out where you are spending your time and on what tasks. Start by tracking for a week or 2. You can track more, but the main purpose is to help you identify patterns and tasks, which are consistently taking up your time. My first web development job was at an Internet consulting agency where I had to log my time. Any task which took more than 15 minutes, I had to log in our billing system. Part of my responsibilities were to try to be billable 90% of the time. While time logging and billing is a topic for another post, I took those lessons of where my time was going and what I was spending time on with me when I started contracting/consulting. I have also continued time logging even in my leadership and corporate roles.
Tracking your time doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as writing on a sticky note, or creating a word doc or notepad listing out tasks and time spent. If that doesn't work for you, you can find and use a good time management system or tool. If you are a person that craves specificity, you can actually run a timer and start and stop it based on what you are working on. The main point is to find out where your time is going. Once you have that insight start making changes. Spend the start of your work day on your most important tasks based on your priority list. Don't lose focus.
Determine business impact and potential efficiencies
Do what matters, now.
- Leo Babauta
At this point, you are now on your way. You are starting to reduce or eliminate bad habits. Or at least you are now conscientious of them and how they impact your work time and you are actively reducing the amount of time spent on them. Next, start incorporating the Pareto principle (80-20 rule). "The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes." source Wikipedia. Usually this is explained simply by stating, 80% of sales come from 20% of clients. Taking this back to development:
- The hardest 20% of the build takes 80% of the time.
- 20% of the code has 80% of the bugs/errors
- 80% of an application can be written in 20% of the total time
Take this information and put it into action by working to have the biggest impact. Reflect back on your time auditing, what's taking your team's time? Is there a system or sub system that's always breaking? Are you dealing with the same bugs day after day? Target the 20% that will have the biggest impact for the business. It's at this point where I see people go wrong or divert from the path of doing highly influential work. I see people in development and support roles prioritize the "Squeaky wheel". According to Wikipedia, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease is an American proverb used to convey the idea that the most noticeable (or loudest) problems are the ones most likely to get attention".
Now at first glance this may seem ok, or even reasonable, at least to those without experience in this type of work. However, think about it for a moment... Is changing that button from blue to red the most important task to work on today? Your client tells you they don't like the sorting; do you really need an urgent meeting today to discuss that? You get told the navigation "looks" off in Internet Explorer 8, which represents 1% of overall site visits; is that really your highest primary objective? Now I'm not saying, don't listen to client or colleague feedback. It all goes back to prioritizing impact and not getting distracted.
Don't under estimate how difficult it can be to focus on impact. It will require saying, "No" often and making sacrifices and tough decisions. It's going to force you to delay gratification. During one of my projects, we had to rebuild part of a system. During those couple of months we had to pause new requests and limit bug fixes to only urgent ones. It wasn't popular with our colleagues, although once the system was relaunched it was more flexible, feature-rich and had better user engagement than the prior system.
This approach to work will push you out of your comfort zone because you'll be making trade offs, and deliberately causing conflict with your internal team and external colleagues. You will question yourself and your judgement at times. Stay focused on the end-goal in every situation, keep in mind the work you are putting in isn’t for you. It’s for the benefit of others, it’s about something bigger. When you come to that conclusion and you own it, you'll be willing to go through hell and back yourself and do whatever it takes to make it happen.
Collaborate and Document
I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it's proactive and there is positive intent behind it.
― Michael J. Fox
When driving impact and making a difference dominates your thought process, you view yourself, your role and your team in a different light. You realize making connections and working together with others will allow you to do significantly more than if you were working by yourself or remaining silo'ed within just your team. Collaboration creates special connections between individuals and teams. You combine specialized knowledge and that gives unique perspective to come up with creative and novel solutions, which allow you and your team to make huge leaps forward. You'll see the team reimagining processes and coming up with huge improvements and efficiencies.
For example, I started working with a new group, we had a huge ticket volume compared to the available development staff and the development team couldn't deliver on larger development initiatives. I did some observing, like I usually do when I start working with a new development group. We started creating documentation on how we handle and route tickets and how to documentation. We had some difficult conversations and we started transferring tier 1 support to a few different groups. Initially, when I started suggesting how to help with ticket volume, I set the expectation to reduce the volume by 20%. The development managers pushed for 10% and we ended up settling on 15%. During that year we kept pushing for more efficiencies and to keep reducing the volume. At the end of the year the team had managed a 35% overall reduction in ticket volume year over year.
Bringing it all together.
Knowing is not enough. We must apply. Willing is not enough. We must do.
― Bruce Lee
Information and knowledge are two very different things. Unless you understand the value of your time, how to make a difference and the dedication to make it happen, you probably won’t have the wisdom to ignore almost everything, while learning and focusing on what will bring the best result. Work to position yourself and your team where you’re just actively moving forward. Your goal should be to create a positive impact loop of execution. While working in this fashion, you can get more done in a few hours than most people get done in a number of days.
Be willing to change yourself and to let go of all limitations holding you back. You’re focused on your future. You’re committed to your goals and committed to bigger results. Your time is spent well because your priorities and focus are clear.
Taking action and making a difference, will get you noticed by your colleagues and your leadership. Doing impactful work makes for a successful career and will ultimately make your life more fulfilled. Best of luck on your journey of priority setting and focusing on doing meaningful and impactful work!