How your team (and you) get more done in the same amount of time
The Creative Tack is not passive, it does not wait until an impasse is reached. It is, rather, the active fitting together of the right problem with the right resources and the right timing. It is the choosing of problems in such a way as to increase the percentage of problems successfully attacked. The student proficient in the Creative Tack asks such questions as: What can I do right now and succeed at it? For which problem do my current resources promise an elegant solution?
– John Gall, Systemantics
Common mistakes people make when they get promoted into management:
Tasking their team with one project at a time, organizing the whole team to get things done, and then moving on to the next project.
Tasking their team with a ton of projects all at once, resulting in never actually getting anything across the line
The second mistake is bad because you’re always working and never getting anything done. The first mistake is bad for two reasons. One is that you have long gaps between shipping work, since you have to start from scratch with each new project.
The second is that different types of projects take different types of resources.
Unless you have a pretty remarkable brain, you probably can’t read a book and listen to a podcast at the same time. But you probably have no issues putting on a podcast while you clean the bathroom.
Projects (and personal to-dos) are the same. If you have your team work on multiple projects that all require a lot of heads down time, you’ll burn people out or get lower quality work. Similarly, if you have a bunch of projects that all require hearing back from external partners, you’re going to spend a long time twiddling your thumbs while you wait for people to get back to you.
That’s why you can get way more done by staggering projects. And why I recommend staggering your projects not based on timeline or number of projects, but on the type of resource they require.
Project 1 requires heads down time, lots of full-brain work
Project 2 takes spreadsheet time (e.g. “podcast work”)
Project 3 requires you to reach out to people and get a response from them, which takes calendar time
Project 4 requires internal political capital and takes calendar time plus a bunch of meetings and discussion
Project 5 just takes money. It’s not hard to execute and it doesn’t take long. But you need money.
Often, you can run all four projects at once. And there’s an advantage to doing so, because it means the end of one project often corresponds to the middle (rather than the beginning) of another. Instead of a cycle of kickoff → work on project → ship work → kickoff, you can have shipped work always coming from your team.
But there’s a bigger reason to approach your work this way.
Some of the best results come on loooong timelines. Is your company patient enough to get them?
About a month ago I was considering joining a series A company, a small but high performing team looking to build out new acquisition channels. Joining a company like that is interesting because you have to both get fast results — the life of the company depends on it — and set yourself up for long-term success (the life of the company depends on it).
As it happens I chose a different path, but I knew that if I had joined I’d have to do two things at the same time:
Ship work, as close to revenue as possible, as quickly as possible. In context, I think this would have been qualifying MQLs and routing them to the sales team.
Get the info needed to build out channels long term. I would simply have to look at all the company’s funnel metrics to understand what would make us successful long term — but I didn’t want shipping work to be on hold while I did that.
The reason to stagger projects is political.
A friend of mine in content marketing once got a really cool promise: if you join the company, we’ll wait a full year before tying content marketing to revenue targets.
Wow! A full calendar year to build a strong foundation of a program and start getting results before facing political pressure to “hit the number” (which often causes behaviors that make it hard to get results).
But of course this almost never happens. And even when an organization professes to value long-term thinking, you’re going to start hearing something like this:
Month 1: “Wow great sounds like a cool plan”
Month 3: “How’s that project going?”
Month 5: “What are the results.”
Month 6: “Results now”
Operating on multiple timelines using different types of resources lets you avoid this — you can set up a project that relies on calendar time and give it time to get results while also shipping shorter-term projects that get reportable results right away.
You’ll find that your company is a lot more patient if you are able to consistently report shorter term results.
Where to look for immediate impact, plus the difference between clock time and calendar time
When I think about immediate impact, I look for things that have tight feedback loops, are close to revenue, and that I have reason to believe are not performing as well as they could. That has in the past meant:
Paid ads performance. If you (qualitatively) think paid ads are underperforming and see a fast way to improve ad creative, testing this and improving results doesn’t take long.
New user onboarding. Again, if you see a gap in onboarding and a clear way to activate new users more quickly, you should see the impact on user activation pretty quickly.
Email performance. MQL qualification. Outbound prospecting emails. Etc. etc.
Where there’s a deficit in your organization (or your new organization) is going to vary, and you need to balance the existence of a deficit with your ability to change it quickly. As I wrote in “enough with ‘quick wins,’” projects come in tiers based on your ability to make them happen on your own. If you can go in and mess with the lead scoring yourself, amazing! If you need to convince a different team to do it for you, that’s going to be a lot harder.
So — you need projects that are 1) close to revenue 2) will show results from your change quickly and 3) is possible for you to change quickly. You can’t work on too many of these projects at once, but you can have a list you work down progressively.
At the same time, you need projects that run on calendar time.
Clock time = hours you spend on a task. You can do clock time tasks faster by working more.
Calendar time = days, weeks, months it takes, unavoidably, for a thing to be done
You can’t make a cake faster by doubling your cook temperature. Or, as Warren Buffet has said “you can’t make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.”
Partnerships, sponsorships, SEO, and a number of other approaches to growth all take an unavoidable amount of calendar time — you need people to respond to you, you need search engines to index your content, and there’s not a whole lot (although not necessarily nothing) you can do to make them happen faster by working more.
This is how you work on four projects at once without getting stuck not shipping anything.
A calendar time project might be as simple (in clock time) as sending a couple of emails every day. That’s not hard to do and you probably have the capacity to do it — if you can avoid getting blinders and focusing all your team’s work on the current project.
As your scope of influence in an organization changes, you’ll need to balance working your to-do list (clock time) with balancing the work of your team. Managing projects based on the type of resource they require will let you make progress on multiple fronts — and is one of the manager skills you’ll need to master as you rise in your career.