6 Mechanisms Which Drive Personal Career Success
These mechanisms relate to your ability to focus on your priorities, drive your career forward, and network over the years. Small but critical tools you can use to make career progress.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
After rapid career growth at Amazon as a development manager over the previous couple of years, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. A bit too much “Yes! Sure I can do it!” on my part had filled up my calendar, and I felt like I was frantically running from meeting to meeting. As the manager of a couple of fairly large teams, I had piles of people waiting to ask me questions, get permission, or otherwise distract me if I managed to get a few spare moments at my desk.
One early bit of advice I’d been given when joining Amazon was that this type of career comes in waves. Some days or weeks, you’ll feel like you have things under control. You’ll be doing well, and enjoying yourself. Other days or weeks, you’ll feel like you’re about to quit, or at least fail completely.
I was in the middle of a down week.
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And then Takisha, my manager, was at my office door. Considering how I felt about being underwater, I wasn’t necessarily thrilled to have her there. She wasn’t the cuddly type.
“Have you made any progress on those 3 open positions?” she asked me. She was referring to the 3 open software engineer positions on my team. Which I simply hadn’t found the time to focus on at all.
“A little, but not a lot. I’ve just been overwhelmed this week.” I said.
She shook her head. “Your team will fail many of your goals this year if you don’t fill those positions. Do you agree?”
It was a good point. I hadn’t necessarily thought of it in that way.
“Yes, I agree.” I said.
“And would you therefore say that filling those positions is your top priority?” she asked.
“Yes, that makes sense.” I said.
“Ok then,” she said, “What percentage of your week is spent on recruiting duties?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know? A few hours are spent on interviews and a recruiting sync.”
“I think you should spend at least 30% of your time on recruiting until you fill those positions.” she said. “It’s your absolute top priority, and you need to make your calendar reflect that.”
I raised my eyebrows. Filling my positions was one thing. And putting more time on it was another, but 30%? That felt crazy. That was probably a dozen extra hours a week I’d need to find to spend on extra recruiting activities.
“That sounds challenging.” I said, diplomatically.
“Have you done a calendar review recently?” she asked.
Considering I didn’t know what that was, I shook my head negatively.
“Let’s look at my calendar.” she said. We walked to her office. This was easy, as it was two doors down.
She pulled up her Outlook, and showed me her calendar. It was a rainbow of fruit flavors. Yellow and purple and red and blue and pink all over.
“This looks disorganized,” she said, “but I find it a great way to ensure that my time is organized according to my priorities. Look, yellow is recruiting. I can eyeball this week and see that recruiting is 7 hours in moments.”
I nodded. I figured out most of her categories pretty quickly. Those yellow interviews and debriefs were clear. Red looked to be important meetings with our senior leadership team. Green were empty time blocks, which I’d completely failed to make. Blue looked to be one-on-ones with her direct team members. A few other colors signified various projects.
“You need to figure out your top priorities.” she said. “Write down what your top few things you need to worry about, and make sure they have colors. Recruiting is certainly one of them. Color code your calendar, and then count where you’re spending your time. I bet that how you spend your time doesn’t line up.”
I went through the exercise. Picking out the colors was difficult. One key point I realized was that it wasn’t useful to simply color code every project because I’d run out of colors. What she said made sense. I had to pick out my very top priorities, and only color code those.
And that made things more clear. Because I did find that half my week was spent on important things (I would have skipped them otherwise), but they weren’t my top priority. As an example, I had a weekly project review meeting for what I might consider my 5th most important project. I’d never considered skipping it, but it was technically taking time away from me spending more time on recruiting.
I added up those hours, and compared it to my priority list. Things needed to change. I started aggressively changing my schedule. And I did indeed find 12+ hours a week to recruit, filled my team’s open positions, and got back to having some good weeks.
What had happened? I’d let calendar invites, and other people, dictate my schedule. “Dave, we’d like you to attend X meeting” is simply someone else’s opinion of what I should do with my time. My opinion on what I should do with my time was more important. And I’d been ignoring that voice.
It wasn’t a brilliant inspiration which helped me dig myself out of this hole. It was a simple, small mechanism.
That 10-minute lesson from Takisha paid dividends for my entire career at Amazon. I spent the rest of my career occasionally reviewing my priorities, and re-coloring my calendar. It was a continual tool I leaned on. And what’s interesting is that I regularly saw people doing the wrong things with their time, partially because they didn’t have a good mechanism to rationalize their calendar with their priorities.
I wanted to share more mechanisms with you all today. Things I came across over the years which I found to be invaluable, even if they feel simple at first.
I’ll also emphasize that these are all mechanisms I did not see people consistently doing. If something sounds obvious, and you do it already, that’s great! Over and over again, I ran into otherwise successful people who could have absolutely benefitted from using one or more of these mechanisms.
1. Calendar priority coloration
To continue with my introductory story, I wanted to finish summarizing this concept.
Create a priority list without looking at your calendar. It should probably be 5–7 priorities.
As a manager, I had things like “recruiting”, “project A” (a critical project), “project B”, “important admin meetings” (e.g., VP wants me somewhere, I go), one-on-ones, free time (I’ll get to that later), and tech reviews (reviewing how our systems were currently functioning).
Now color code your calendar to see how you’re actually spending your time. Simple, but revealing if you’re willing to be open-minded.
2. Calendar time blocks
Related to people driving your calendar. For several years, here’s how I managed my time. I’d accept or decline meetings based on how important they looked. They’d fill up my calendar more or less. And then before work, after work, and during any time a meeting was cancelled, I’d do my work.
So I’d get into work an hour or more before my first meeting. I’d try to catch up on email, start writing a promotion document I needed to write, or read someone else’s document.
Then during the day, I’d almost always be 100% booked, around 8 hours a day (usually 9am-5pm). When I was lucky, someone’s meeting would end early or would be cancelled. I would then swiftly grab myself another coffee, and try to do more of my work.
Around 5-6pm when my meetings ended, I would spend as long as I could afford trying again to catch up on email, and do my various other work I didn’t have time to do all day.
Essentially, the things I had to do were squeezed into the holes other people left in my calendar.
Then I was told by Takisha (the calendar master apparently) to please put some time blocks on my calendar to get my work done.
What exactly did she suggest? 2 or more hours a day should be set aside at all times for my own work. It felt excessive, considering I had a 100% full calendar, but she insisted it was reasonable to set aside 25% of my time for me to do my work. And looking back on things, that feels extremely reasonable.
Those hours should be either labeled with either “Dave work time” as a generic block, or perhaps a more specific purpose. For example, let’s say we were in the middle of OP1, Amazon’s planning process where we figure out everything we’ll do the following year. This happens to be an extremely busy time for Amazon managers.
If I needed to read a document for 30 minutes in the next week, I should immediately block 30 minutes for reading that document. If I needed to update a document for 1.5 hours, I should immediately block off that time.
Obvious, but I’ve seen well over a literal hundred calendars at Amazon, and mine was one of the very few to respect this rule.
If I had important work to do, I blocked explicit time off on my calendar to do it. When possible, I used the time from “Dave work time”. And other times I’d cancel or reschedule meetings to find that time.
This meant that combined with color codes (see section above), I didn’t have to “remember” to do my critical work. I had time set aside to write a document, compose a performance feedback email (flagged as private in my calendar, so others couldn’t see it), read a particular operational ticket I felt I needed to review, and so on.
This is a way to own your calendar, and how you spend your time. You set your priorities. You ensure your priorities (and all your important tasks) are reflected in your calendar. Now drive your daily behavior and attendance off your calendar. If each step is done right, you’ll be spending your time wisely.