FOCCCUS yourself out of being overcommitted.
Executive Summary
A man walks into his doctor’s office and says “Doctor it hurts when I do this”. The
doctor replies by saying “I see. So stop doing that!”.
If only it was that simple. But maybe it is.
We’re all overcommitted and overworked. What if we went to our productivity doctor
and she prescribed the following:
● If you’re asked to put more on your plate than it can hold, just say no.
● If you’re not done with what’s on your plate, finish it before you go back for more.
● If you’re proud of how much your plate can hold, don’t be. Only take pride in what
you accomplish.
That’s what this article is about.
It’s a mental model shift about how to level your workload to your available capacity and
to focus on getting things done…or, better yet, on delivering what’s really
important…delivering real value.
A little bit of stress is healthy and motivating. Just think of the stress moments before
an important presentation or that glance in a full length mirror at the end of a long cold
winter.
A lot of stress? That’s not so healthy and motivating. In fact, it can be downright
debilitating.
According to the Mayo Clinic, “stress that's left unchecked can contribute to many health
problems, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes.”
We have all experienced a catastrophic time or two where we’ve been so stressed by
our commitments that we can barely muster the energy to drag ourselves to the couch
where we veg out in front of the TV and mindlessly devour a pint of ice cream.
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Most of the time, we figure out how to survive the stress. However, when we have more
demands placed on us than capacity to satisfy them, we become the bottleneck. When
we become the bottleneck, we’re going to disappoint someone: your clients, colleagues,
friends, family, or yourself.
That’s when the stress starts to mount. That’s when the couch and ice cream look like
the only way out.
That’s the definition of burnout.
We’ve all been there.
There is a more practical and less caloric solution to the problem. I’m proposing a
solution that is an adaptation of Clarke Ching’s “The Bottleneck Rules” and it’s called
the FOCCCUS method of alleviating bottlenecks in systems.
FOCCCUS stands for:
F - find the bottleneck (in this case it’s you)
O - optimize (personally work more efficiently)
C - curate (ruthlessly prioritize)
C - coordinate (reorganize the way work flows to you)
C - collaborate (get help)
U - upgrade (become a faster, healthier, more powerful you)
S - start again (rinse and repeat the above)
Let’s take these one at a time.
F - find the bottleneck
If you find yourself buckling from the weight of what you’re carrying, you’ve found your
bottleneck.
It’s you.
Now comes the hard part.
You have to admit to yourself, and to those that are counting on you, that you're not
invincible and it’s time to set boundaries. Wrestling with your superhuman wannabe
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ego, and at the risk of being judged negatively by friends, colleagues and loved ones,
you have to take action to FOCCCUS on yourself. You know this will disappoint some,
but is designed to make sure you don’t disappoint everyone, not the least of which is
you. Acknowledge you are the bottleneck.
On to the next step.
O - optimize the way you’re working
This next step is designed to make sure that you’re working as efficiently and effectively
as possible. Whatever you are working on, focus on it, be in the moment and work
optimally.
That’s called being in the zone.
Some people call this flow time which is “characterized by the complete absorption in
what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time”. Flow is a period
of time “in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of
energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity”
To optimize the way we work we must develop the rituals that get us into the zone and
keep us there for as long as required.
More has been written about productivity than is known. My google search on
“productivity” returned 458,000,000 results in 0.53 seconds :-) . Here is one interesting
blog post by Marah Whitaker that discusses the Flowtime technique that she uses to
help her become a more productive writer. That’s one of half a billion posts on the
subject!
We all need to find our own way there, especially if we’re going to be working on
creative and technical tasks.
Helping you ease into the zone may mean finding the best time of day or night where
your energy is just right. Listening to music. Sitting in your favorite spot. Wearing the
right clothing. After your 3rd cup of coffee. Before exercising. After exercising. You
figure it out, but become a master of your zone.
Once there, do your utmost to protect yourself from interruptions.
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Interruptions are enemy #1 to work in the zone. It’s time we all declare WAR on
interruptions.
Some interruptions are obvious: messages from Slack, email, phone calls, facebook,
instagram, newsfeeds, Jira etc. Just shut them all down if you’re planning on getting
your important work done! Set boundaries. Zero interruptions for the next hour. Zero
interruptions for certain mornings of the week.
In a virtual world, meetings may seem like a great way to build community. However, if
we’re not careful, they can easily become a major source of lost time. Keep them short.
Start them on time. Have an agenda. Invite only those necessary. Make decisions. If
you find yourself multitasking during your meetings, maybe it’s best for you not to be
there.
Which brings me to multitasking.
Multitasking is not only an illusion, it is the single biggest contributor to loss of
productivity in your life. Check out this article from the Cleveland Clinic entitled “Why
Multitasking Doesn’t Work”. When we say we’re multitasking we’re actually task
switching between one or more tasks. Switching costs may be imperceptible, giving us
the illusion that we’re multitasking, but they are still there.
When switching between tasks that require a significant amount of energy to reset, such
as from debugging a program, to updating a project plan, to working on a 1000 piece
jigsaw puzzle, there is a high cost to pay for the switch. In the end, not only will the time
to complete each task be extended, but the resetting time will be added to the overall
duration. Multitasking could be robbing you of a significant amount of time that could be
put to better use.
Think you can multitask? Think again.
From an article in Cerebrum Journal called “The Multicosts of Multitasking”
“...individuals almost always take longer to complete a task and do so with more errors
when switching between tasks than when they stay with one task.”
So you have optimized how you work, but you are still the bottleneck. Now what? It’s
time to apply the 3 C’s of FOCCCUS.
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I find that applying Curate first has the biggest effect on the stress of being the
bottleneck.
C - Curate
It all starts with a list. Get all of your tasks out of your head and onto a list that you can
visualize!
Much of the stress of having too much to do comes from forcing your brain to juggle all
of the details of everything on that list in your head. If that wasn’t enough, you have to
do all of that juggling while swimming in the emotional soup that potential failure cooks
up for you.
Once you see it all in a list you can begin to manage it. You’ll be amazed how much
better you’ll feel just by getting it all down in one place!
Now it’s time to curate your list.
Assign every item on your todo list two attributes: value (high, medium, low) and effort
(high, medium, low). First sort the list by value and then sort the list by effort.
Now draw a line after the last item on your list that you more than likely can get to within
whatever period of time you choose…day, week or month. The tasks above the line are
now on your “active list”. Now here’s the fun part, you get to totally ignore everything
below the line. Yup, everything. They are on your “backlog” and out of sight and out of
mind…until the next time you curate your list. What a relief! There is that much less to
worry about.
Your active list is there to protect you from your backlog because you are the constraint.
At the heart of The Bottleneck Rules is that the throughput of the constraint determines
the throughput of the system. We need to do whatever we can to keep you alive,
healthy and working at peak performance :-).
The waiting-for buffer protects you in three ways, it:
1. Provides your next task. You don’t waste valuable productive working time
deciding what to work on next. Whatever is on the top of the list is next in line for
you to work on.
2. Prevents overeating. A small active list will help you resist the urge, or
pressure, to start too many tasks at once. The mindset change of this system is
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that your goal isn’t to juggle as many things as you can, enabling you to boast
how busy you are. The goal of this system is to enable you to take pride in
completing the maximum number of valuable tasks, in the shortest period of time
possible. Start too many tasks at once and you slip down the multitasking
slope…and we know where that gets you.
3. Prevents starvation. Conversely, if you complete a task and reach into an empty
buffer while you are still raring to go, you've forever lost whatever time it takes to
find your next valuable task. The buffer will make sure that your productive self
always has something of value to work on.
One last point to keep in mind here. Once you pick something from your active list and
begin working on it, do whatever you can to finish it. Don’t go back to the active list,
don’t go to your backlog, don’t get distracted and definitely never, ever, allow anyone to
substitute their task for your in-process task.
In summary, once you’ve started a task, you have to fend off interruptions at all costs.
Now that you have your two lists in place (active list and backlog) you may have all that
you need to remove yourself from being the bottleneck. If not, we have a few more
tricks up our sleeve.
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C - coordinate
Once you sit down to work, you may find that you don’t have everything that you need
to finish what you’re working on. It might help if you spend some time coordinating your
activities in advance so that you’ll have no delays when the time comes to get the work
done.
If you’ve ever worked on a complicated lego kit, you know that it’s hard enough to follow
the directions. No sense complicating the process by having a disorganized pile of
pieces to sort through for every step in the process. Take a little time up front
organizing the pieces and coordinate them with the build process and there will be less
screaming and cursing along the way.
Another example may be that 30 minute weekday dinner recipe that always seems to
take 90 minutes to finish end to end. They never seem to account for the 60 minutes of
cutting, slicing and measuring that the non-existent sous-chef has to perform in order to
spend the 30 minutes cooking. Planning for and completing that prep work does indeed
mean that it will take 30 minutes for the actual cooking task.
C - collaborate
Even though you are accountable for delivering what’s on your list, in order to get it all
done in the prescribed time, you may need some help. Stay focused on what your
unique skills are, and coordinate and collaborate with colleagues in order to make it all
happen.
Think of a surgeon.
While she is uniquely trained and skilled in performing surgery in her area of specialty,
she doesn’t do it alone. She doesn’t schedule the surgery. She doesn’t prepare the
operating room. She doesn’t prepare the patient. She doesn’t administer the
anesthesia. She does pick the music, wields the knife, and directs the team during the
operation. She doesn’t monitor the patient in post-op and she certainly doesn’t invoice
the patient.
Think of yourself as that surgeon. If you’ve become the bottleneck to delivering value,
even though you might be able to do it all yourself, focus on the unique skill you bring to
the task and coordinate and collaborate with others to maximize your value-adding time.
Which brings us to the next to final step in our FOCCCUS methodology.
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U - Upgrade
If you’ve come this far in applying the FOCCCUS methodology, I’m certain you’ve
experienced dramatic results in your ability to get valuable things done. This is
happening because you’re signing up for less things to do, you’re working on the most
valuable things, and you’re making sure that once you start working on something, you
take it all the way through to completion. You’re still managing a large backlog of things
to work on, but you now have a much smaller and very manageable active list. You also
have the discipline to work optimally and set up firm boundaries against interruptions.
Most importantly, you’ve now experienced the differences between “being busy” and
“getting things done” and you’re getting hooked on…maybe even getting obsessed
with…the later.
One last word about that obsession to see things through to completion.
Can you imagine if surgeons measured success as the number of surgeries that they
started as opposed to their patients’ outcomes? Imagine waking up in the middle of
surgery only to find that all the doctors and nurses had abandoned you before they
stitched you back together?
Treat each task that you sign up for as if it were a patient in surgery. Don’t leave them
hanging on the operating table. It’s painful and their screams are intolerable.
Now back to the concept of upgrading yourself. If after all of your FOCCC efforts you
find that you’re still left with more valuable things to accomplish than you can
accomplish by yourself, and you really want to seize these opportunities, it’s time to
upgrade yourself. Shy of cloning yourself you can:
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buy better tools
hone your skills
educate yourself
take care of your physical, emotional and spiritual well being
practice mindfulness
look for the joy in what you do
and don’t forget to ask for help when, not if, you need it.
That brings you to the final step of the FOCCCUS methodology, start over.
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S - Start over
If you’re lucky, you’ve FOCCCUSed yourself out of being the bottleneck to value
delivery. That certainly takes the pressure off but suggests that the bottleneck has
moved elsewhere in the system because every system has one and only one constraint
to throughput. Now that you’re a FOCCCUS expert, it’s your turn to help someone else
get FOCCCUSed.
Onward!
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