No time to do - how accepting things won’t get done is the most transformative way to boost personal impact (and for your Agile team)

We live in an age where there will always be more to do than there are hours to do it. Instead of relentlessly hunting for a time management hack, I’ve found accepting things won’t get done the most transformative way to boost my personal impact (and sanity).?

It’s currently spring and warm enough for me to sit on my balcony to replenish the lack of Vitamin D I’d endured over UK winter months. In my view is the Greenwich clock tower and behind it, the Royal Observatory Greenwich. The observatory is home to the arbitrary point where we regulate the world’s time (hence the name Greenwich Mean Time).?

A history of time

Today, the notion of timekeeping is crucial and it’s hard to imagine a world without it - it allows us to coordinate meetings across the world, it enables our GPS systems to work, it provides a marker for things in the future, and the list goes on. It is hard to remember a time without time. But this is only a case of the recent, even up to the 19th century time keeping remained a local phenomenon, each town would set their own clocks to when the noon sun would arrive. The accuracies of time and time keeping weren’t need, knowing the time wasn’t going to speed up the growth of crops or make the cows come home any faster. It was not until the invention of the railway that coordinated time was required so trains can run on a schedule. It was also not until the industrial revolution that we factored time into work. The capitalists of then needed a measure to ensure all his labourers worked their share to prevent the factory owners from being cheated of labour they had paid for. It was then when the primary measure of work became time, and no longer output or impact.

Time today

Today we continue with this Industrial Revolution convention, most of us are paid according to time, we earn an hourly rate or we get a yearly wage that is tied to us giving up our 9 to 5 every day of the working week. We sell our time for money and our employers try to maximise our output for their money. Technology and modern methods of operations have enabled employers to increase efficiency and thus make a better margin on our labour (e.g. more output per labourer). For labourers, we haven’t found any more time to sell, so the only way to appease our employers is to follow their demands and to churn more work. First there was Scientific Management, later there was Toyota Production Systems and Waterfall Project Management, and more recently, Agile. The basis for all these methods is efficiency, as we can’t get more time, the solution was to design a more time efficient method so more output can be created.?

What we are getting wrong

The pursuit of efficiency has created technology like email and Slack. Email was originally designed to solve the issue of long delays in getting snail mail received, Slack was created to sync your team’s comms as the email chains were getting so convoluted people avoided opening them like the plague. But these technologies, designed to help us free up time has evolved into something even worse than Hydra - as you reply to an email, two more come in, if you are known to be the one that replies quickly, you get rewarded with more emails and pings. Emails and messages have been an easy way for people to delegate their priorities to others, and the satisfaction of answering and clearing your emails only lead to more heads popping up in the Hydra that follows you everywhere in your pocket.?

What we get wrong with Agile

Agile has been no different to email. It was originally created as older delivery methods created waste (e.g. outdated requirements) and Agile promised the new found time would make teams happier and outputs faster to ship. But like with emails, the newfound time means more features could be added or more bugs could be fixed before the product shipment. The reward for finishing work is more work, the reward for competence is more stress.?

Many companies got sold on the advice from Management Consultants who don’t understand the nature of Agile, the companies adopted Agile as a way to get more things done, or to deliver the same with less people. They restructured their company and embraced scrum, they adopted mantras like ‘fail fast’ and implemented practices like Story Pointing. But seemingly they aren’t any more competitive, their customers no more loyal, margins no wider nor their employees any happier.?

What went wrong?

What has gone wrong is that we haven’t challenged our view of time and efficiency since the Industrial Revolution. We continue to gauge our competence based on how many things we complete, but the formula for efficiency is broken, with our misuse of emails, Slack and Agile our inputs are reaching towards infinitely so it doesn’t matter how efficient we are, we will never get it all done. This is the new reality we need to face into and address head on.?

Subconsciously we all recognise the problem that there will always be too much to do in work and in life (did you just open Instagram? Now you have 10 new places to go to, 20 new foods to try and 3 types of dogs you must own). And if we keep our focus solely on the efficiency formula the only way to stay ahead is to jam-pack our do list with small and meaningless tasks: reply that email, respond the chat, find an easy to implement feature to boost the velocity. Getting these things done might give us a sense control and empowerment as we’re ticking things off, but in the grand scheme of our lives is it really moving us forward or fulfilling our lives??

Getting the meaningful things done

The meaningful things in life get left behind since they take significant investments of time, mental capacity, and energy all the while you are not guaranteed an output that you can use to ‘improve your efficiency’. We look at the big questions in life and say it will take at least a full day to answer so it’s better to just answer that email now and hope some free time miraculously appears in the future. I was guilty of this (and continue to be), I delayed my decision to do my MBA for 3 years because it was always easier to stay on the efficiency hamster wheel.?

For companies that have adopted Agile, it’s no different: the new golden measure is Velocity (what it really means: teams will find easy tasks to buffer to the target or worse, find ways to inflate the points. Why risk doing the new inventive things for customers when it can all collapse into nothing?) Companies also adopt ‘fail fast’ and assess the viability of projects quarterly at QBR (what it really means: companies want to trim costs constantly and fail any project that isn’t successful quarter on quarter. But from the VC world we know that most ventures take 3 to 4 years to be cashflow positive and 7 to 10 years to become the next ‘cash cow’ - a fail fast culture means most companies will only ever adopt products that are void of risk and, thus, innovation)

It’s time to be better

Getting off the hamster wheel that the factory owners created for us since the Industrial Revolution requires you to adopt a philosophical change and not a time hack. It is about reapproaching your perception of time and efficiency:??

1. The first step is finding your own way to accept that there will always be more to do, the emails will never end, and list of features remain bottomless?
2. The second step is realising you have a limited amount of time, mental capacity, and energy every day, and in the long run we are all dead. There is a finality to yourself and time as you can experience it.??
3. The third step is reprioritising your time and energy to face into the toughest questions you have for yourself and accepting that you can only measure your life against them, not the measures others have set for you where you try to hide behind.
4. The fourth step is clarifying what work is meaningful to you, that engrosses you so much so that when you do them, time stands still and you enter your own world.?
5. The final step is understanding how you can make one (or some) of these things your main contributor to society and this your source of income. How do you create a competitive advantage using these things that bring you value and your customer/employer value?

?If it is not yourself but your Agile team you are trying to fix, then for steps 4 and 5, ask what is your team’s competitive advantage, what knowledge does your team have that no one in the world knows (this should somewhat come out of answer Q3)? Deliver your competitive advantage to the world and look to outsource or automate everything else.?

Through accepting there is always more to do, become at peace there will be things left undone, and things we need to say no to. It is by saying no to these things that gives importance to things we say yes to?