If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together
- African Proverb
Self-management: choosing what to work on, how much time to devote to that work, making all the intricate decisions about that work, and deciding when the work is complete all by yourself. The work gets done efficiently, possibly even quickly with one, clear vision. The work will not suffer from design by committee where it gets bogged down and Frankensteined together and eventually shoved over the finish line when resources or time runs out.
However, I’ll not bore you with the many downsides of going fast alone. My only comment on going alone is to point out that those glorifying the rugged individual are usually willfully ignorant. You’re here, working in a company with a very large goal, so you’re well aware of the need to work in concert with others on anything of real significance.
Working on a team with a common goal means that your effort impacts not only you but everyone else and their effort as well. Group work requires the humility to admit you don’t know everything - including the fact that your individual effort could make everyone else’s work more difficult. Simple for you could make the effort of others around your more complex. Conversely, difficult and time-consuming tasks for you could make everything faster and easier for everyone else around you. There of course is an entire spectrum between those poles as well. The only way you are going to know if your effort is worth the time is by checking with the team around you.
Self-management on a team requires communication. Constant, consistent, well-organized communication.
You need to communicate problems. You need to communicate possible solutions (not just one). You need to communicate before you go off and “solve” something. You need others to communicate with you. You need to be able to prioritize as a team, and you need to be able to ensure everyone who needs to contribute, has contributed any or all of the following:
By the way, constant meetings means nothing actually gets done, you are just always only talking.
Early communication can sometimes best be characterized as “yelling into the void” where an excited idea generator vomits information all over people who aren’t ready to hear it. All that excitement is really falling on deaf ears. Sometimes it takes hours, days, weeks, or months of thinking about a set of problems before having the words to describe it. It’s possible no one else has been thinking about it or realizes that any problem exists or could exist or will ever exist. You need to do the work of preparing them to hear.
Preparing others to hear may be as simple as writing up a meeting agenda before inviting someone to a meeting. If you want someone to provide answers or help, or at the very least have them be in the right mindset for the topic you are going to discuss, don’t ambiguously (and ominously I might add) ask “can I borrow you for 30 minutes.” Thirty minutes is never merely thirty minutes: context-switching is devastating to focus and by extension productivity. Providing a white paper to read before the meeting would be better. Allowing teammates time to review and provide comments and questions before the meeting according to their own schedule and pace is even better still.
Early communication may involve creating really rough drafts, hand-drawn sketches, super ugly prototypes, storyboards, diagrams, and spreadsheets. Artifacts in early communication are quick and dirty with just enough fidelity to let your audience know “this is just the beginning, this is where I’m heading, what do I need to be aware of before I/we go too far?” It clues others into problems you’re trying to solve and ways you’re thinking about solving them.
Most importantly, it prevents you from becoming emotionally attached to the first things that have popped into your head. This helps YOU accept early communication, feedback, and alternative solutions.
If what you are about to do is going to take some significant effort or in some other way impact others, you’ll need to ensure the right people actually heard and understood your early communication. You need them, even if they are no longer going to be involved, to be aware that work is going to be getting done, that is important, and that it should not be interrupted. You need them to not only contribute ideas and critiques, you need them to acknowledge the priority and commit to the effort, even if it means leaving you alone to complete it. This is not saying other people are unintelligent or negligent, it is acknowledging that your teammates are busy, they are focused, and that what you are presenting to them requires them to stop, take time to completely switch gears, and to think about what you just wrote/said/presented.
We have reviews and approvals, not to prevent you from working, but to free you to work with all the gusto you can manage and to prevent you from having to looking over your shoulder. It helps busy people provide you with what you need – acknowledgement that they understand and will support you as you proceed.
The next area of communication as part of self-management is status updating. The worst part of a road trip is “Are we there yet?” It’s annoying. It takes you out of the mood of the trip. It reminds you that not everyone is as invested in the trip as you are. And it has the ominous feeling of someone ready to derail the trip because they’ve lost interest. But sometimes “are we there yet” is a question of concern especially if it comes from your loved ones who are anxiously waiting for you to be safe at your destination. Important work projects are the same.
Teammates are going to want to know how your projects are coming, especially if you were successful in getting them excited about the opportunities. OR teammates are going to forget you’ve taken on a significant project, and your quiet absence while you’re heads-down-super-focused is going to be taken at best as your boredom or at worst as your snootiness. We need to let each other know how our work is coming….however….
No one wants to read your book of updates and rants every day. And no one wants their chat constantly blowing up with system state updates. When you start work, letting your audience know that progress is being made without being annoying is the best way to ensure
What we need are way(s?) for individuals to provide updates incrementally and publicly (at least company-wide). Status updates should allow teammates (and by teammates, I mean anyone in the company) to subscribe and check progress without having to stop each other in their work or schedule a meeting. Individuals get to manage time well by communicating corporately in a consumable way where everyone can check in on each other asynchronously.
Most of us are involved in a bunch of different projects. It would be good if each of us had a place where we listed out what we’re doing and thinking about. We can collect our thoughts and work on ideas that may or may not be quite ready to present for buy-in. Maybe we’re getting ready to go vacation. Maybe we want a little spot for others to stalk us (in a nice way). Personal updates could be a good way to remain approachable even if we’re in the weeds and can’t talk for a bit. Confluence has a personal space that we can share with the organization.