Achieve More by Doing Only One Thing a Day
Too frequently, we focus on juggling the dozens of things vying for our attention, when we should think about what really matters.
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. Each week I send an article to all subscribers. Free members can read approximately half of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, half of each article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member!
I like to keep my articles evergreen, always relevant, and high quality. Occasionally, when I stumble on an article that I sent a few years ago, I update it to my current writing style (which I’d like to believe is improving over time), and re-send it. This was originally sent years ago, but I’ve gone through some updates to make me happy.
My usage of the word achieve in the headline is intentional. Achieving is about accomplishing a result, not about getting work done. Because when you think about it, we’re not being paid to do work. We’re paid to get results.
As a quick example, imagine you wanted to have a party at your house this weekend. I mean, I would rather not have a party at my house. I’m too busy, and I’m an introvert. I don’t usually like parties. But you’re not me. You want a party. And important to my quick example, you want to clean and tidy everything so that your house looks nice.
You start at your bookshelves. You first categorize your books by genre. Then you sort them by color so that you create a beautiful rainbow across each shelf. After three hours (I imagine you have many books), your shelves are the most beautiful shelves your guests will have ever seen.
I hope you realize that this was a huge waste of time. If you have a goal of getting your house ready for visitors, there are critical tasks to be worked on first. Tasks you’d probably call “on the critical path”, such as cleaning the bathroom. Your time spent preparing your bookshelves for guests will be unappreciated, and at this rate you’ll run out of time for more important tasks.
Similarly, when I'm driving around with my wife and I make a wrong turn, I like to speed up and say, "We might be going the wrong way, but at least we're making good time." A statement I’ve found funny for at least the last 20 years. Some jokes never get old.
These examples all point at the same thing. We get our heads wrapped around the idea of getting a lot of work done, but what we should be looking at are the results.
A lesson in significance.
I once had a memorable meeting with an engineering manager who reported to me.
Me: "I noticed you missed the meeting with the recruiting team today. Don't you need to hire quite a few people?"
Manager: "I just didn't have time for it. I had a couple project review meetings, I had to work through our bug backlog, and we have to get the next UI design ready to be looked at."
That manager was underwater. They were slowly falling behind on all their projects as their team had quite a few openings.
If that manager did absolutely nothing else that day other than hiring one person for their team, it would have been a fantastic day for them.
Similarly, if they had success in those project review meetings, squashed a number of bugs in their bug backlog meeting, and got the new UI design ready — but made no progress on hiring, it would be a bad day.
They, like so many other people, were so busy bailing out their leaky boat that they didn’t stop to figure out how to patch the hole in the hull.