The Double Ds

Anthony Soltero -

You have way too much work to do and not enough time to do it.

Welcome to the party.

Ad hoc requests come in, time sensitive projects appear on your plate, fire drills pop up, and you're constantly interrupted.

How are you supposed to focus on your most important work when other things get in the way?

The Double Ds.

Deprioritize & Delegate.

Deprioritize

What work can you put to the bottom of the list without sacrificing your impact?

You can only work on one thing at a time (multi-tasking doesn't exist), so you're always deprioritizing something, just not consciously. If you're doing one thing, by definition, you're not doing anything else. You're also not communicating your lazy prioritization to your stakeholders. People are expecting their request to be at the top of the list, but it's probably not.

In order to work on what's important, you must do two things:

  1. Deprioritize with intention. Deprioritize work on purpose. Actively choose what you will work on and what you won't. This gives you clarity on how to use your time to create the most value.
  2. Communicate the priorities. Your boss, peers, and stakeholders need to know what your priorities are. People are less likely to push you if they know what to expect.

The goal is to create clarity, for yourself and for your stakeholders.

After you get clear, people are not expecting you to make progress on their request. They know it's been deprioritized.

Now you have mental peace to work on the next thing.

How to deprioritize

The steps:

  1. Make a visual list of your obligations. Use a project management software to see things visually. I use Trello but you can use Jira, Asana, Airtable, or something similar (you can also use a bullet list in a text editor). The goal is to list every single obligation you have.
  2. Rank items in order of importance. Put the most important projects/tasks at the top of your list and least important at the bottom.
  3. Pick ONE obligation as your top priority. Move it to another list. The new list should only have one item on it. Everything on the original list is now deprioritized.
  4. Pick two back-up items. Pick the next top two from the original list and put them into a new, third list, your "back-up list". If you hit a stopping point on your main priority or if you're blocked, pick up one of these back-up items.
  5. Communicate with stakeholders. After you've gone through this exercise, communicate with everyone who's expecting something from you. Let them know whether or not you're working on their task and when they can expect an update.

De-prioritization should take you to the promise land, but you still feel overwhelmed.

Time to delegate.

Delegate

Once you deprioritize, you will still have critical projects at the top of the list.

You will feel uneasy about not working on them but it's still too much to handle.

The next thing to do is delegate.

If you're a manager or team lead with authority, delegating is easier, it's part of your job.

If you're not a manager, it's harder but still doable.

How to delegate if you're not a manager

You need to be strategic and less overt, here's how:

  • Have your manager delegate for you. Ask your manager for support. Let them know that you've went through an entire de-prioritization process and still have too much to do. Ask them if there is anyone on the team that can pick up some of the work while you focus on your ONE thing. You'll be surprised how effective this is.
  • Ask stakeholders to do some legwork. This will buy you time. Ask stakeholders to refine their requirements, do some preliminary research, or give them options to self-serve. Let them know it's in service of opening your time to help them. You'll find that they either solve their own problem or forget about the request. Either way, you save time.
  • Empower junior team members. Junior team members want to be wanted. Ask them to help out on less critical items. They are eager to help and will learn along the way.
  • Ask peers for help. Your peers want to be wanted as well. Elicit their help (but make sure you've built leadership capital first). Don't overload them, but get their assistance and thank them afterward. This will lighten your workload and help build your peer relationships.

This is a constant process. Revisit it often to make sure you're working on the most impactful projects.

There are numerous ways to make more time for the work that matters.

I prefer the Double Ds.

It's sexiest thing you can do for your career.