To paraphrase Mark Twain, "Use time wisely, they are not making any more." A subject touched on in an earlier post, how Dick deals with the pressures on his time will go a long way to determining how successful he and Acme are.
A recent conversation between Barak Obama and (British Liberal leader) David Cameron sums up the point well, that:
Mr. Cameron: You should be on the beach. You need a break. Well, you need to be able to keep your head together.
Mr. Obama: You’ve got to refresh yourself.
Mr. Cameron: Do you have a break at all?
Mr. Obama: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be ...
Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.
Mr. Obama: Right. ... In 15 minute increments and ...
Mr. Cameron: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.
Mr. Obama: And, well, and you start making mistakes or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel ...
Mr. Cameron: Your feeling. And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions.
Mr. Obama: That’s exactly right. And the truth is that we’ve got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know 10 times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you’re trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante, but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you.
Okay, maybe putting Dick in such lofty company isn't fair ... to Dick. He is, after all, a business person, a creator of services, products and jobs, not simply a generator of words, positions and headlines. But the principle is the same: if not careful Dick can find himself consumed by the daily management minutiae.
Dick's job (any entrepreneur's job) is to do what managers can not do: offer a vision, set strategy and see how all parts of the company and environment fit together. Do the Big Thinking. And to do that requires time: quality time, alone time, reflective time.
But how? In a Blackberry, connected-24/7-world, how can Dick escape? How can I, in one post, say that Dick's key job is hiring and training and developing managers, a very time consuming process, then argue that Dick needs to find time to do nothing but think? The cute answer is that I can make contradictory arguments because all I do is offer advice: I don't have to take it.
The real answer is that there is no contradiction: Dick needs to do both, and other tasks as well. How? Well, cloning himself, even though a father-through-passport of Dolly the cloned sheep, won't work ... fast enough anyway. Dick has to learn to manage time, not let time manage him.
Linda Stone makes an interesting distinction, that we should manage our attention, not just our time. Rather than slaving ourselves to a never-ending list of jobs to do, Stone argues that we must create chunks of time where digital, analog and human inputs are blocked, time where we can focus attention on few but key things.
Sounds a lot like the money-making Time Management mantra, of seeing the difference between "urgent" and "important," then ensuring you spend time on the latter each day. Sounds good, as all platitudes do, but the question of how to do it remains.
The web today abounds with personal-productivity resources: sites like Lifehacker, blogs like 43folders and gurus like David Allen (not in any way a definitive list). All good, but all suffer IMHO from the same fault every time management system has: somewhere, somehow, the person must actually "do" the steps, and that requires being selfish.
Personal productivity, "getting your head together," requires two necessary qualities: ability to say No and willingness to focus on personal needs instead of the never-ending wave of requests from others.
Neither are easy. In future posts I will look closer at some of the most popular personal productivity sites and methods (I'd like to call them fads, but ...). In the end however, the most important step is allowing yourself to be unavailable.
Years ago, when cell phones were just becoming popular (yes, I am that old: I also recall when computers were not personal, but that is another story) I asked a senior Western executive of a Chinese high tech firm why he refused to carry a cell phone. "Because if they can find me to ask what they should do they always will, and so they will never learn to do it themselves."
Great advice. I've repeated it for years to explain why I didn't carry a cell phone. Inside the advice is a greater truth though, that being selfish and finding time for yourself inevitably means allowing subordinates/peers to make mistakes. If you are not there and instead off somewhere alone thinking Big Thoughts, well you can't stop them from doing the wrong things, from making mistakes.
And thus the great bugaboo of developing managers, allowing managers to make mistakes, rears its head here as well.
I know from personal experience, in life as well as work, that allowing someone to make a mistake that you know you can prevent is incredibly difficult to do. But if I want my daughter to ride a bike by herself I have to take off the training wheels and let her ride around the corner without me. Same is true in managers. Getting time for yourself means taking off their training wheels and letting them steer by themselves.
Gulp. We'll talk more about this later as well.
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