Good Work, but Not the Right Work
Busy, busy, busy.
In any company (small companies especially), it’s easy for leaders to get busy. Rushing between planning meetings, standups, retros, and one-on-ones, then trying to squeeze in some dev work as well. The work adds up quickly and you can barely catch your breath.
So with all this work, how do you know that you’re making progress? What if you’re just running in place? Let’s take a step back and evaluate the difference between doing the right work and just good work.
Too Much Good Work
There’s a saying that there can be too much of a good thing. When it comes to software development and management, it’s true. Last week’s post discussed the challenges of focusing on work you’re uniquely qualified for instead of just work you’re well qualified for. This article takes that concept one step further:
How do you help someone (a peer, a teammate, a boss) who is doing good work, but you believe they aren’t doing the right work?
There are two mindsets we need to break down:
Busy equals good - Busy usually means working hard but doesn’t necessarily mean working smart. Unfortunately, just being busy doesn’t equate to getting everything you need to get done completely.
All my work is good work - If someone is performing the wrong work, it may be a difficult conversation with them, but there’s a straightforward resolution: stop working on the wrong work and start working on the right work. In contrast, what happens all their work needs to get done, but not now or by them?
Let’s tackle these in turn.
Busy Equals Good
I still fall into the trap of thinking busy equals good. I’ll be working hard, fighting fires, creating content, writing code, and many other things. Am I really making progress, though? This trap takes a bit of reflection (as discussed in last week’s article) to evaluate how I can best help my team or company achieve our goals. Running in the wrong direction is still running.
The flip side of being busy and not taking time to reflect is that I believe you can fall into a victim mindset. Statements such as “I’m already working as hard as I can, what more can I do?” can reveal a lack of ownership or responsibility for results.
Leaders, at any level, are responsible for results, not just the actions to achieve those results. If you can achieve better results with less work, you should be encouraged to do so. On the other hand, working extreme hours should not always be a valid excuse for not achieving results. A leader must constantly reevaluate their work, prioritization, management, and leadership style to most effectively deliver results in a reasonable period. Brute force rarely works for more than short spurts.
If you have a colleague with this mindset, try focusing on results, not the number of hours worked. What are their project or team goals? How is their progress? What needs to be done to achieve these goals? Don’t yet focus on who does what. Make sure you both nail down the “what” first. We’ll make time to focus on the what in the next section.
All My Work is Good Work
The second challenge in this article is the trickier of the two to address. As mentioned above, replacing the wrong work with the right work is easy. But what about replacing good work with great work?
It’s challenging to let go of work you know needs to get done. It’s even harder to quantify the cost to all your work if you overload yourself. Humans aren’t machines. We don’t have infinite energy or focus. At some point, whether it’s a stress level or many hours worked, our quality of work slips. Being creative, empathetic, communicative, and attentive to detail takes energy. Doing everything isn’t sustainable, and if we try, all our work suffers.
This is why it’s so important to focus on the right work, even if that means delegating, deferring, or dropping work we know needs to get done. Prioritization alone won’t work, though. Leaders never have a set to-do list. Instead, new items are getting added all the time. Prioritization helps address the most critical (or, unfortunately, the most urgent work) first but doesn’t help identify when to stop working or how much time to spend on each item.
There are two approaches to packing 50 hours of work into 40 hours: cutting and squishing.
Squishing is rushing through all your tasks in 80% of the time they really take so you can finish all your tasks. Prioritization isn’t as important when you complete all the tasks. The problem is that not all the tasks are done well. You’ve probably caused yourself more pain down the road, but yes, technically, everything was completed.
Cutting means the last 10 hours of work don’t get done by you. If you’ve prioritized your work appropriately, then the lowest priority 20% doesn’t get done. Unfortunate, but you’ve completed the other 80% well. I believe that in most cases, this is the better approach long term. Find ways for those 10 hours to be tackled by someone else, deprioritized to next week, or truly not done at all. You may be surprised how much work doesn’t need to be done.
The natural approach is to squish work. Try discussing with your colleague the advantages of cutting. Have there been examples of squishing backfiring? Are there ways to offload the lowest priority 20% of their work? Are they well qualified but not uniquely qualified for some of their work? How can we make time to do the right work well? Framing the problem differently can help bring attention to the unseen costs of squishing.
Summary
I hope these two points have helped you think of some problems differently. This article may have raised more questions than answers, but those questions are discussion topics for you and your colleagues to discuss and resolve. To solve a problem, you must first recognize that there is a problem.
Let me know if you have other strategies that have worked for you!
If you’re interested in learning more about this article, please send me a note at brian@connsulting.io or schedule a time to chat at https://calendly.com/connsulting.