Are You Spending Time on What Matters?

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If you’re an executive, a manager, or even an individual contributor, you may be tasked with trying to have a certain impact at your company. Senior leaders often have large initiatives. Even individual contributors can and should have ideas to improve things. Your manager may assign these to you or you may propose such a project yourself (it’s a great way to get noticed). The challenge is that moving the needle typically requires dedicated time and effort. In many companies, it’s easy to get distracted by volatility, side projects, and other time sucks. Fortunately, there’s a simple technique you can use to stay on track.

You may be familiar with the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. It says we don’t focus resources (time, money, effort) equally, but spread them out over a power law distribution. You spend 80% of your time driving on 20% of the roads in your town. 80% of your socialization time is spent with 20% of your friends (your closer ones), and only 20% of your time with the other 80% (the less close friends).

Businesses often find 80% of their revenue comes from 20% of their customers. The ratio isn’t literally 80/20, but the point is that a few larger clients or very engaged customers drive the majority of their revenue. They also find 80/20 in their support costs; that is, a few customers make up the majority of support costs. If a large customer has little support cost, it’s ideal; if they have a high support cost in proportion to the revenue they create, it’s acceptable. When a business finds a low-revenue customer with high support costs, that’s a problem. This is what leads companies to “fire customers” since the cost doesn’t justify the revenue.

Let’s consider the categories of tasks you do in your job. You don’t spend an equal amount of time on each. Likewise, not every task you do moves the needle equally. The key question is: Are you spending the time where you should be? I’ve had high-growth quarters when I spent half my time interviewing candidates; I’ve had other quarters when I was deep in architecture and prototyping for a major new release. My time from quarter to quarter varies with my goals. That’s true for most people. What matters is that I’m putting the right level of time and effort into the various goals I have in a given quarter.

It should be clear what moves the needle. If it’s not, have a conversation with your manager to get her input or to get sign-off on your ideas. Then you need to decide how much time should be spent on that project (see below). The key, then, is making sure you are spending the amount of time you intend. It’s not unlike having a target allocation in your portfolio and checking quarterly to rebalance if it starts to stray too far from the target allocation.

Recognize that some, possibly much, of your job may be as a cog in the machine. Your role may involve putting out weekly reports, responding to inbound requests, and doing other tasks that don’t move the needle but are a key part of your job. If you're a cog, you need to keep turning; no shame in that. If you’re in a role like safety or compliance, your first priority is always preventing problems before you invest time in improving things. That’s fine. If you have an idea as to how to improve things by 40%, that doesn’t mean you need to spend 40% of your time on it. It does mean that if you have two non-core tasks and one is more likely to have a big impact, you should potentially be spending more time on that one.

I write “potentially” because it’s important to think not just about impact but expected value. A project could have a range of potential outcomes or a high chance of failure. You, or your managers, may prefer that time is spent on high-risk, high-reward projects, on smaller, more certain ones, or split equally between the two. In other words, you may choose to look at the expected value rather than considering only the potential impact and ignoring the odds of success. However you choose to do it, make a conscious decision and then make sure you are allocating time appropriately.

But how do you know if you’re spending the right amount of time? The good news is there are some simple metrics you can track. AI makes it easier. I recommend looking at this on a quarterly basis or semiannually.

Start by reviewing your meetings. What’s the topic? What’s on the agenda? What percentage of your time is spent on topics that will move the needle versus other tasks that will have less impact? AI can help with this analysis. Meetings might cover multiple topics. Likely, you’re using AI to record the meetings so it can help parse the content and topics. You can also run AI on your email, Slack, or other messages. Look at what percentage is spent on each task category.

Obviously, you can look at it multiple ways, such as raw number of messages versus amount of content. The real question is the amount of time it takes. A one-sentence question in an email can require more effort than a long email that isn’t highly relevant to you and that you can TL;DR just to maintain a general awareness of the status. You’ll have to use your judgement and, if you’re using AI, give it some guidance.

If you’re an individual contributor, look at where you spend your time. In addition to meetings and emails, you may spend more time on task work and need to record that time manually. I recommend keeping a simple log. You can even keep it on a piece of paper by your desk, adding rough entries at the end of each day. (You can do it on paper or write it in code if you’re worried about a manager who might see it and want to review your work; but that’s a separate issue outside the scope of this article.)

The more senior you get, the more you oversee as part of your core responsibilities, and the more likely you are to be tasked with helping implement new initiatives. Consequently, it's very easy to get distracted. The distractions may be one-off problems that each seem minor but, taken together, add up to a lot of time; there may also be ongoing demands on your time from other responsibilities.

If you see a pattern where you aren’t able to provide the amount of effort or attention a project deserves, it’s time to take action. It may be as simple as reprioritizing meetings and emails or learning to say “no.” It might be a conversation with your manager about needing additional people or shifting some work to others given your load (but these conversations need to be handled delicately; that’s for another blog post).

What matters is not that you align everything perfectly; you won’t. Rather, it’s important that you dictate your calendar rather than having your calendar dictate how you spend your time. Doing this type of quarterly or semiannual analysis helps you stay on top of it and catch misalignment of your time to your goals. The frequency should be set by the level of effort of the analysis compared to the risk of being misaligned.

Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month, famously said, "How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time." We do project management check-ins to catch such drift early. We should think about applying project management techniques to our own jobs, including doing this type of check-in. How do you fall behind on your quarterly initiative? One day at a time.

(You may also be interested in the article “The 80/20 Trap: Why Some Team Members Negatively Impact Your Management.”)

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