What's your job, like really?
“If I did everything my bosses asked me to do, I’d get fired.”
A few years ago I sat in a coffee shop with a head of marketing who was trying to recruit me, and even though I didn’t want the job he said something that I haven’t forgotten.
“If I did everything my bosses asked me to do, I’d get fired.”
Caught up in the day to day, it’s easy to become reactive to what people want. What this guy understood and what I have come to appreciate is that there are a lot of day to day tasks that aren’t the job.
The real question, instead of working on someone else’s to-do list, is “what are the 1-2 most important things.” Here’s some stuff that’s almost never the 1-2 most important parts of your job:
Creating a new process in whatever task management tool you use
Setting up automations that save you or your team 20 minutes a day
Making slides to explain your strategy to internal stakeholders
Check-in meetings
The random fire drill your boss asks for
Updating process docs
Reporting
Documentation
There’s some controversial stuff in there (“what, reporting? That’s important!”), and a bit more on that later. For now, notice that everything on the list is for internal stakeholders — none of these actions generate immediate value for anyone outside the company, and usually those are the people who, ya know, buy your product.
I have a background in search engine optimization (SEO) and I think, as a field, it’s a great example of this.
The name search engine optimization implies that the job is to “optimize” a website. The goal of SEO is almost always to bring in more traffic and business from search engines — and there are some god-awful websites that pull great results because they get the 1-2 most important things right.
What would ultimately make you, me, and everyone else more effective is if we zeroed in on those 1-2 most important things. In general, jobs exist to get a result for a company (although the company/hiring manager doesn’t always do a good job of defining that result). If you can identify the result that your job should be working towards — and get your manager’s agreement that yes it is in fact the goal — you get strong grounds to push back on everything that doesn’t get you there.
What were you hired to do? What’s the result you were hired to get for the company?
How much of what you do every day is actively working towards that result?
Why people don’t do their jobs, even when they want to be good at their jobs
People want to be good at stuff. I’ve seen the effect that struggling at a job has on someone who’s generally successful and hard working — the distress it causes — and it’s hard to watch because the answer isn’t more hard work, but hard work on different things.
What’s the result you were hired to produce?
That’s the most important question, and if I asked you “are you working towards that result,” I bet you’d say yes. Most people do. I’ve had more than one come-to-Jesus moment where I had to hold myself accountable for not doing it.
Digging in to how people actually spend their time (and hard self-reflection), I’ve found a lot of minutes are spent on:
Avoiding day-to-day pain by adding processes
Avoiding even very impactful activities because they require going through other teams (that can be difficult to work with)
I’ve had people tout “a new process for [thing]” as an accomplishment for the week. A new process for going through design, or establishing new meetings with product, or creating a new reporting template — none of these are shipped work, and I only care about them to the extent that they produce better or faster shipped work.
But they often don’t.
The cruel twist of time spent removing pains is that it ultimately adds pain. “If I did everything my bosses asked me to do I’d get fired,” because it takes away from shippable work that creates value for the company.
I’ve spoken to people who “automated” reporting that takes them 10 minutes a month — which means one hour of setting up the automation doesn’t pay itself back for 6 months. (Plus, the process of pulling reports manually made it easier to notice outliers and catch problems).
This isn’t value-generating work. It’s pain-saving work designed to avoid an annoying task. I’ve known project managers who continually roll out new processes so they don’t have to keep following up with everyone individually, and every 6 months there was a new process, everyone got confused, and following up individually still had the best results. Yes chasing people down isn’t fun. But what if they’d just followed up?
There are going to be parts of the job that are no fun. I’ve automated some things in my work, but ultimately there are times when I just have to suck it up, do the shit work, pull the manual report, and move on.
You can be 10x better at your job by cutting away almost everything that doesn’t create external value
I keep a weekly to-do list, except it isn’t a to-do list.
I go into every week knowing there’s more I won’t get done than I will get done. I used to write out a whole giant list, and then get stressed when some items stayed on it for one week, two weeks, three weeks...until I realized that stuff was weeks overdue and nobody had asked about it. A lot of tasks were self-imposed.
Now I go into each with a to-do list of five(ish) things. As long as these five things get done, it was a good week — no matter what else happens. I know my KPIs, and whatever those five things are need to be working towards them.
What about reporting and process and meetings and all that stuff?
There’s some of that. But ultimately those things are only useful insofar as they make it easier to produce better external results. I believe in:
Minimum viable process. Don’t build a process for scale until you have to, since most processes change before scaling anyway.
Minimum viable reports. What do you need to monitor health and keep the right people informed? Do that. More reporting is only useful if it leads to more insight.
Minimum viable meetings. Except on the really hard days, where sometimes a light 30 minute meeting is exactly what’s needed.
“Will this help us ship better, faster work?” If the answer is no, “will this keep people informed, which gets buy-in, which will help us ship better, faster work?”
And if the answer is still no, cut it. Don’t let process creep eat your week.
What I love about this approach is that it gives me fantastic grounds to push back on things that don’t make sense.
I often hear people ask “what’s the purpose of this” or “what’s the goal here,” and even though I think that’s an important question, it usually comes at the wrong time. It feels like a challenge. I’ve even felt challenged by it! When I have a small thing I need from another team that’s being pushed by an executive, the delay is annoying — the thing is happening.
But when an executive asks me for work, I increasingly am able to say “here’s what I’m looking at. Here’s what I see. Here are our results from the past, and here’s what we did to get them. I don’t see how what you’re asking for gets us to the result we need.”
Sometimes I’ll even say “I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. Can you show me?”
Adopting this frame makes it easier to have hard conversation. It puts you on the same side of the table — a jigsaw puzzle instead of a game of chess.