On a recent trip to the Bay Area, I had a chance to share a dinner with an amazingly productive and visionary friend who works in the social change field. In the midst of dinner she asked me a very interesting question,
“When your goal is very long-term, how do you decide what to do today? What is your process for making choices about what gets done first?”
Really, really interesting question that is at the heart of my work, and at the heart of all self-directed knowledge work. With knowledge work, we often aren’t told what to do, or even what our outcomes should be. We have to start with a long-term vision and walk back to tangible tasks to do and real systems to build.
In the course of our conversation some cool things came out.
First, I tend to prefer tasks that get others unstuck. If people can’t get some of their work done because of a bug or bad process, I want to address that as soon as I can. A key thing about knowledge work–so much of what gets done gets done by other people. We’re almost always in teams, and unsticking teammates is crucial to team success.
Another thing about getting other people unstuck is it shows you are listening. Addressing a piece of work that others have raised shows you respect the needs and input of others. That will bank good will for when you need it in the future.
Second, I like to do things that overtly show movement in the right direction. People love incremental improvement they can see. It’s much better to take many small steps toward a goal, and let people see them happen, than to take a giant leap that happens behind closed doors. Salesforce.com has done an exceptional job at this over the years. There is a faith among the customer base that all problems will be eventually resolved, because they’ve seen progress every 3 months for years now, even if there isn’t faith they will be all addressed tomorrow.
Third, do things that don’t create a big support tail for you. When you work with a community of users or customers, their requests can easily overwhelm you. Don’t jump to do work that creates an untenable support load. Analyze all work you’re considering with this lens. It’s not always clear if you’re setting yourself up for a big tail, so be careful. Doing things without a tail will allow you to move on to the next task with all you’ve got.
Fourth, think about how you would undo or improve the work you just accomplished. If you are implementing a process that thousands of people will interact with, you want to get it right the first time because changing that in the future may involve re-training all those people. But if you’re designing how a request from that system is handled behind the scenes, it might not affect many users to swap out a new way to handle that request. If you’re abstracted from the end users, with technology or personal processes, things will be easier to change. And if things are easy to change in the future, you can move more quickly now, and get more done.
Finally, don’t make any decisions today that you can‘t put off to tomorrow. This may sound like procrastination, but it’s not. You will usually have more information tomorrow than you do today, so if you can make progress without locking yourself into something, you’re better off.
I hope this helps you think about the knowledge work you’re doing every day. We all make this kind of analysis innumerable times subconsciously in our work. It was great to have my friend raise the question and get me thinking about it.
