I once again loved this episode of the Art of Network Engineering featuring Mike Bushong. He is a very astute judge of character as well as how to apply social skills to your tech role. Definitely listen to the above episode if you’re interested in countering cognitive biases.

In the episode, he told a great story of how he had a pivotal career moment with one of his managers that led to some important introspection. I won’t tell his story but the summary is that he had taken on way too much work and way too many roles and he blew up at his manager because of the stress. She leveled him with a quote that rang true for me:

“No one knows everything you’re working on. They just see that the thing that’s important to them is late.”

That’s not the verbatim quote but that’s how I remember it. It’s definitely something that I’ve been thinking about since the previous episode when he mentioned it the first time.

Load Bearing and Busting

The odds are good that we’re all doing way too many things right now. Whether it’s doing more work in our role or taking on way too many projects in our free time. The human mind seems to crave stimulation and we provide it by keeping our brain so busy that it never has a moment to rest. Sometimes that happens because we’re too focused on saying “yes” to everything and pleasing people. For others it comes because we want to be the focal point for everything that happens in our team or organization.

Taking on too much work is manageable in the short term. We can rearrange deadlines and burn the candle at both ends to make it all work for a few weeks or months. However, when the amount of work that we have to do or the number of projects we have started eventually collapse under their own weight we feel exposed and angry. We’re mad because we’re overworked, yet we are the ones that caused the situation. We’re frustrated that so much relies on us without realizing that we could have said “no” at any time and had less to do. We’re upset that we have too much to do AND that we are the architect of our own struggle.

I feel this in so many different ways because I’ve lived it. I have a hard time saying no. I don’t even take my own advice. I delude myself into believing this time will be different and that I won’t get overwhelmed. Somehow I’m always proven wrong when too many things are going on all at once that require me to do them because I’m the one that made it that way.

No matter how talented we are at project management or learning or any skill you can think of there is only so much we can dedicate ourself to doing. Once we hit our limit everything suffers. If you’re familiar with Quality of Service policies it’s why adding one more packet to a congested link doesn’t just hurt the performance of that single packet but of the entire link overall. Going past your limits makes everything worse.

Finding Your Focus

Just today I heard a wonderful quote from Krazy Ken of Computer Clan fame:

“Focus is about saying ‘no’.”

Declining to do something because you know you’re hit your limit isn’t negative. In fact, it’s the smartest thing you can do to help those around you. If you’re always agreeing to do something when it is brought to you then what exactly are you focused on? If anyone can give you a task and you just preempt everything else are you even focused at all?

I’ve felt this over the past year in a very specific area. I’m the course director for my local Scouting America’s Wood Badge course. If you think I’m busy in my work life I can promise you that my volunteer work in Scouting is even busier. I do way too many things. That was brought into sharp focus for me last year when my time to step forward as the course director was apparent. I had to assemble my team and get everyone working toward the goal of putting on this wonderful course. But I couldn’t do it entirely by myself. I had to rely on my team to get it done. The amount of focus that it takes to make this happen meant that I also needed to step back from some of my other roles.

It was hard to do this! I’d spent years leading a pack and volunteering to be on every training course that I could think of. There were even other opportunities that I wanted to explore that I knew would take just as much time as the thing that I had committed to doing. I had to decide what was most important for me. And I had to realize that while I was delegating things to my team I was also responsible for something even more important. My job was to not take on any new responsibilities until we finished this course. Letting go is hard. Not picking up things to replace them is even harder. My brain craved the stimulation of having something to think about. I didn’t want to just go over the same list again and again to make sure things were headed in the right direction.

When you take on too much you do your entire team a disservice. If you’re not available to help because you’ve agreed to do something that someone else could or should be handling you’re holding everyone back. The modern interpretation of this comes from the excellent Phoenix Project book by Gene Kim. Everyone knows about Brent by this point. The single point of failure in the organization. But how many of us recognize that Brent is a problem because of his necessity to the organization and still do what we do either out of a desire to be more helpful or out of a need to control everything?

Delegation is about focus. It’s about saying “no” to things that you know someone else not only can do but should do. It’s about eliminating distractions and poring your energy into something that needs it. It’s easy to say that someone who has too much to do is unfocused. But when you frame it as a problem of choice it becomes easier to see where the changes need to be made. Some things are absolutely going to require your attention. You’ll know what those are because they are so intrinsically linked to you that they’ll fail without you. But don’t think that everything needs your attention. That’s how you find yourself in the trap and lose focus.

Tom’s Take

As of this writing, I’m two weeks away from the start of my Wood Badge course. I have a great team that has done so much over the past year to be ready to put on a wonderful leadership seminar. But they could only do that because I trusted them to make it happen. I’ve done this a number of times already and it would have been easy for me to jump in and offer way too much advice or even take on the tasks myself. For the first time in a very long time I knew the answer was to sit back and do the least amount possible. Not because I was lazy or malicious. Because I knew they needed to feel like they had an impact. I needed to focus on the important things. I needed to be available to those that needed my help, not doing their job for them. If you find yourself in a similar situation ask one very important question: “What would Mike Bushong do?”