Don't Let Others Run Your Life — Cut Your Schedule Like a Slasher Movie
If you don't make hard choices to focus on your top priorities, then you're choosing to fail at your top priorities.
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.*
Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member! As a side note, I wrote the original version of this article more than 5 years ago, and I felt it was time to re-write it!
During interviews at Amazon, we allow five minutes for questions at the end. Some people ask about the team they’ll be working with, while others inquire about the technology they’ll be using.
Occasionally, a candidate asks some version of this question:
“I’ve heard Amazon can be a really hard place to work. Some people thrive and some people fail. Why is that, and how can I avoid joining the ranks of those who fail?”
This is a great question. It’s not wrong that Amazon can be a hard place to work. I have heard a variation of this statement at Amazon dozens of times over the years:
I’m going to lose my mind! I have 14 direct reports and one critical project on fire, and my calendar is completely packed. The only way I can make any progress is by working after my team goes home. I’m not sure how much longer I can take it.
If we pull apart that statement, there are a couple of important nuggets to consider.
What did that person say was the problem? Too much work. “14 direct reports” “critical project on fire” “calendar completely packed”.
They said the only fix was working longer hours.
Due to this terrible situation of too much work, and the only fix being longer hours, they were thinking (idly, or actively) about quitting.
Except I think they’re fundamentally wrong about their basic assumptions. The issue isn’t too much work, and the solution isn’t longer hours.
Something to understand about creative vs. routine work
How many burgers can a McDonalds burger maker create in a day? Actually, I don’t know, but I’m positive that McDonalds does. How many boxes can an Amazon worker pack? I’m sure they have a very specific calculable number. How many packages can a UPS delivery person deliver per day? I assume it’s known, based on distances, traffic, package distribution, etc.
These things are known because they’re routine work. If you are assigning work to a UPS delivery person, you likely assign them the number of packages you believe they can deliver. Why? Because if you assigned them fewer, they’d deliver fewer. And if you assigned them more, they’d fail.
These are routine jobs, which means the difficulty and time involved is known. You have a routine solution, which means you know how to complete the work, and you have detailed information on exactly how long it should take.
The opposite is true for creative work. When you’re doing creative things (examples include coding, marketing, design), how long will it take? You have no idea. Because if you knew, you’d create a script and get someone cheaper to run that script.
Instead, these are creative jobs, which means you’re creating something from nothing. You’re inventing. This takes an unknown amount of time.
Ok, so getting back to my point. If you’re a manager of a UPS delivery driver, you have statistics telling you exactly what to assign them.
But what if you’re the manager of a software engineer? Ooh, that’s rough.
You could try to measure their story points, but those are fake made up numbers. You could try to measure their lines of code, but everyone on the internet would make fun of you for your ignorance. You could try to measure the number of projects completed, but everyone would choose the easier projects. You could try to measure how much money was generated, but that could be gamed so easily in a thousand ways.
So unfortunately, there’s no way to know exactly what someone could get done. Instead, managers muddle their way through trying to understand how reliable people are, if they tend to hit their dates, if they’re respected, and so on.
But how do they know how much work people can get done? The answer inevitably is, they don’t.
What do managers at top companies do?
If you’re a manager at a top company, and you have creative workers on your team, how do you throttle work to your team members?
First, in reality, good creative workers are hopefully not assigned “work”. Instead, they’re assigned categories of things to solve. Because creative people work on areas, not on specific tasks. Things like:
“Fix the bugs in that system before launch”
“Make sure we hit that date”
“Get that design ready for our presentation”
“Answer your emails and instant messages”
“Attend these meetings”
How much work does a good manager send towards their employees? The answer is… (drumroll).
Too much. They send that employee to work, until the employee cries uncle.
That’s the end. It’s the only way to do things.
You can’t send them less work than they can do because you might end up with idle employees. Besides, you have a massive pile of work sitting in front of you, and you want as much as possible out with your team to deal with.
You don’t know what their capacity is because you don’t know how long any work will take. You might have some guesses, but you really don’t know how busy it’ll keep them, when they’ll be idle, etc.
In fact, if you’re not micromanaging them, you will never know how long each item took because they’re hopefully working independently. They fix some problem, you thank them, you move on. You never know if that took one hour or seven.
Rewinding all the way to my original question, is the core issue that the employee has too much work?
No, that can’t be the problem. Because creative employees at top companies always have too much work.
What’s the real problem then? Well, think about it from the manager's perspective. They assign work into a bit of a black box (because as I said, they don’t know how long work will take, and they only see things when they’re done). What’s their signal that an employee is too busy?
They know an employee is too busy when the employee tells them. “Hey. I know you’d like me to complete this task, but dude, I’m too busy.”
So the problem is that the employee hasn’t said no.
If the problem is that the employee hasn’t said no, what’s the solution? That’s what I’m going to walk through in this article. How you save yourself from burnout. How to re-discover the freedom of a reasonable work schedule. How to find time to think at your job, and not frantically run around like a chicken with your head cut off.
As I like to say, time is your most valuable resource, in life and at work. You can’t make more. You can’t pause it from going by. You can only allocate it. Let’s talk through how.