I have seen so many colleagues make this mistake. Especially tenured ones. They slowly lose their productiveness and move further and further in the direction of “busy work”. Working on tasks that makes them feel busy, but in reality adds very little value to the business and long term objectives.
Do you often find yourself not working on the most important thing? Are you able to distinguish between urgent and important in your daily work?
Productivity and the right prioritization were two key determinants of successful people at Uber. They took very deliberate choices each day to avoid the trap of busy work.
Differentiate between urgent and important
Being able to consciously work on the most important things that are both urgent and not urgent is key to long term success.
Urgent: Requirements immediate attention. It catches your attention and pressures you. May be easy, or funny, or popular and can be both important and not important.
Important: Contributes to your medium and long term goals, to your teams purpose
Courtesy of Eisenhower and Stephen R. Cover - Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
- Quadrant 1: If you focus too much on quadrant 1 it will dominate your life completely, but it can be essential to resolve crisis once in a while
- Quadrant 2: Is the basis of effective management - act preventively, seizing opportunities rather than solving problems. You need to be proactive not to neglect these as they will not demand your attention. If you ignore them they will eventually become urgent (vicious cycle). To move to this quadrant, you must 1) know your priorities, 2) learn to say no to other activities
- Quadrant 3 & 4: AVOID these! Things that are either urgent and not important or not urgent and not important. They are time steelers that will move your focus away from the important work and might give you a false feeling of being productive (answering email, slack messages etc.)
Key takeaways
- Procrastinating on tough projects. That monster project awaiting you might do fine sitting on your desk in your current day job, but procrastinating the tough jobs as an entrepreneur usually only makes things worse. If you cant handle something, delegate it or seek outside assistance. Don’t just set it to the side
- Delaying hard decisions: You probably make few decisions in your current position, at least compared to the many you’ll make as an entrepreneur. Hard decisions may take their toll on you, but you need to come down on one side or the other. Even a bad decision is better than no decision, so eliminate your bait of delaying decisions now.
- Doing busy work: at most startup you have so much work that you can always be doing something. Doing busy work means doing stuff that is unimportant, but that you like to do.
Productivity Hacks
Since starting in 2015 I took notes on the positive habits created by this mindset on topics such as prioritization, ensuring productive meetings, avoiding procrastination, efficient communication and many many more.
I have written a bit more about my reflections in the deck below. (entirely my own personal reflections, views and opinions nothing to do with Uber).
Hopefully some of these habits will be useful for other individuals or high growth startups.
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