Sunday 6 September 2015

Time Management




Last time around I've spoken about taming meeting invites, and in passing mentioned that this technique is one of the cornerstones upon which effective time management resides.

Time management is a bit like playing a musical instrument: many people try it, few persevere with it, and even fewer get it right.
However, this is yet another case where mastery pays off. As a superficial example, let's take two imaginary technical leads: each gets, say, 20 daily e-mails/instant messages/mailing posts with requests for help. Due to efficient schedule organisation, one manages to respond to each and every one in the same day; the other responds on average within a couple of days.

What happens is a positive feedback loop. People, seeing that the first guy provides more immediate help, start flocking to him. More importantly, he gains more visibility, and more popularity points. And, eventually, when the time comes to move up the ladder, he will have the edge over the other one, even if the latter is as good on pure professional merit.

Here's a bit of visualisation:




Of course, it's a little bit idealistic, and no deity has cancelled office politics, or pure element of luck, but it's undeniable that strong time management skills are an asset for both individual and their company.
Since you're hopefully convinced by now that the topic is not negligible, we can take a look at a few helpful practices.


Time as currency



When we buy items (soft drinks, cars, houses, curiously shaped lava lamps), we always attach intrinsic value: i.e. how much we're willing to spend on them. However, dollars/pounds/euros/yuans (insert your monetary unit of choice) is not the only currency we hold. In today's hectic IT environment, another important and finite asset we've got is time.

Let me stress and underline the word finite here. Spend an hour on an obscure design question, and that will be an hour you cannot spend on helping others with their challenges, brushing on new technologies, or spending with your family or hobby. 




Now, with material objects, we usually know how much we're willing to spend. I'm happy to invest thousand pounds in a high-end guitar, and would not depart from more than a pound on a bicycle (since I don't ride them). For another person, it will be completely the other way around: both approaches are individual and perfectly valid.

Importantly, this analogy still holds true if we replace pounds (or your currency of choice) with minutes, hours and days. 

Defining a set of responsibilities for a new micro-service is something that as an architect I'd be willing to several hours for. Vice versa, as a manager, I'd be unwilling to examine an interface in microscopic detail, and will restrict my time there to 30 minutes at most; the goal will be just to ensure that I understand it at a high level, and can tie it to business goals.

Same task - different intrinsic values.

Just to avoid displaying managers as superficial - there are plenty of opposite examples. An engineer does not have to spend more than 15 minutes drafting a daily update e-mail. Manager can and should pay more than that as their role demands accurate and unequivocal messaging.


All in all, there are little mental price tags attached to all that we do; we just normally don't notice them, Being oblivious to those little tags can easily cause to over- or under-spend; it is as if we were pulling random wads of cash from the wallet when paying over the counter in a supermarket. Understanding how many minutes we're willing to pay on X, and staying true to that is a cornerstone technique for efficient time management.

Context switches

Despite what philosophers and humanists may say, people do resemble machines in more ways than one, and a prime example of that are context switches. You're probably familiar with the topic, but let me mention it anyway - context switches occur whenever we move from one unfinished task to another. Both humans and machines do not perform any useful work when they swap contexts; at worst, if we constantly switch back and forth between tasks rather than completing each one in turn, we're thrashing in a state of unproductive semi-panic. 




Of course, it's not hard to arrive to the solution: stop thrashing and do your work in a strict order. Or, as one Russian writer pointed out - "if you want to be happy, be so". 

The problem is that things don't always go our way, and we cannot always complete all our work sequentially. If a developer starts writing a module that would take 8 hours to complete, they can't should not ignore the world around them for an entire day, and not deal with important code reviews, cries for help etc.

The trick is quick prioritisation. When a new request comes in, I tend to take a quick priority call among the following response times:
  • Drop everything and answer immediately. E.g. a widespread outage, an onsite sales engineer needing help, or a immediate call for action from my boss.
  • 30 minutes. For example, someone else in the company is stuck with their (non-critical) task, and could be unblocked with my help.
  • 2-4 hours. Typical examples are: a general request for information on a non-urgent customer case, or a code review.
  • Next working day. Planned document review, request for a weekly report etc.
The idea is that unless the environment is extremely chaotic, and most incoming transmissions do not fall in the first bucket, I can at least manage my interruptions, and reach a certain point where it's easier to switch to something else.

But, things can sure fall in the second and third bucket a lot, and quick and dirty prioritisation does not bring full salvation.


Forecasting interruptions

If your role does not include a lot of coordination, i.e. your title does not have the magic words Manager, Lead or Architect in it, then you can safely stop reading here. In many ways, you can count your blessings: people and priorities don't pull in different directions, and you get to create something new without being constantly tapped on the shoulder. So, if you're still with me (either by the virtue of your role, or due to sheer curiosity), let's say that you get a lot - and I mean, a lot - of interruptions that demand response within the same day or sooner.




Here, the challenge of being able to get on with the day-to-day job is still pretty much there. Yes, we just mitigated it a bit by doing a quick pre-filter, but mitigating does not mean solving. It is still very easy to get bogged down in a constant reactive cycle, where you just respond to requests rather than  generate new value.

Yet, there is one little factor though that gives IT professionals a little edge towards solving this, and distinguishes software professionals and, say, football goalkeepers. The latter do not get any pattern in how often balls come their way. It might be once every 5 minutes, a cluster of ten balls towards the end of the game, or never. With software professionals, there's always a pattern. Normally, emails and questions come mostly during the first hour of the working day, towards the end of the day, and whenever any time zones we work with kick in.
If we zoom out for a moment, we can also observe a seasonal flow: end of fiscal year tends to be way more active than mid-July.

Understanding the organisation and its industry brings in more insight into when it's safer to plunge into long, focused, endeavours, and when it's better to deal with superficial tasks.
With all of that, I tend to pre-plan time slots which are open for involved, uninterruptible engagements; for example, it might be 10-12 AM, and 2-3 PM on a typical mid-week, mid-fiscal quarter day. Both slots avoid the time needed to answer morning and last night's questions, and also late afternoon when other time zones become active.

All that builds into day pre-planning. Before the day starts, I tend to know what meetings are scheduled, when I need to tend the goalposts (that goalkeeper analogy keeps on working!), and when I can switch into uninterruptible tasks, such as long-term planning or architecture design, without great risk of forsaking something important.


Summary


Altogether, there's no magic bullet. Yes, there's plenty of books about 7, 10, or 1024 habits of highly effective people, and no, you or me won't become highly efficient overnight by reading them, or indeed, this blog post. 
A large part of being efficient stems from good knowledge of your company, industry, people around you, and your own strength and weaknesses, including ability to organise the workday, as well as concentrate and switch from one topic to another. Moreover, time management employed by a CEO might not be right for a developer, or a mid-level manager.

As with the other posts, my goal was not to proclaim a world cure, but to share the little tips and tricks that worked for me, with the hope that they might help a few people in their careers and work/life balance.

P.S. Interestingly enough, it took over a month to write a blog on time management. That's life: it just loves irony.