Doing "the most important thing" is a trap
This talk is little about why you need to say 'No' to people more, and how things can go wrong when you don’t learn to do it enough.
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Abstract
We get into our roles and progress in our careers by sampling a little of everything, by being adaptable and capable of understanding and doing many things.
But sometimes “the most important thing” isn’t the thing that you should be doing - you’re a part of a broader team, remember! And maybe, just maybe, someone else should be doing the thing instead. It’s especially tough to remember this when companies and teams are changing; when you lose those key individuals and roles which keep the machinery working and processes flowing, but it’s a slippery slope to ending up doing the essential things, but not your responsibility, and never being able to find time for the critical IC Leadership stuff that only you can provide.
It’s about learning to say No - but not even to others, to ourselves. Yes, that work needs doing and yes, it has a big impact and it’s super important. But no, I don’t have to be the one who does it and no, I’m not going to do it because I should be doing something else that’s unique to my role that’ll pay off in another way.
This talk is little about why you need to say ‘No’ to people more, and how things can go wrong when you don’t learn to do it enough.
Slides & Script
We get into our roles and progress in our careers by sampling a little of everything, by being adaptable, and by being capable of understanding and doing many things.
The challenge that I’ve found is in maintaining focus and prioritising correctly against that background noise of things we could be doing.
We’re Individual Contributors. We’ve got agency, and to a certain extent we chose what it is that we work on.
So how do you choose what to work on?
If you’d have asked me that question a year or so ago, I would say “Do the Most Important Thing”, because I figured that it would come down to a fairly obvious judgement call based on the impact I’d have and the needs of others.
Fast forward to today, and I’ll give you a different answer. One that’s more along the lines of “Do Your Part / Your Role” – or at least, do your role FIRST
I’m going to talk about why my attitude has changed, and why I think that focusing on ”The Most Important Thing” is a Trap.
So let’s go back a few years, and I’m working as a Staff Engineer on a project.
We’re gearing up for the first product to go Live on our new platform, and we have our target launch date set, and we’re going full-on towards that goal.
And while we’re working away at that, going on outside we have that big post-covid crunch, and exciting new things like generative ai starting to emerge, and inside we have a bit of a company reorganisation happening.
As a result, people leave. Some of my leadership peers go, some of the engineers, and of course they’re awesome people who are hard to replace.
But we’ve still got that deadline looming. And although new people are coming in, stepping into these roles, and they still need to get up to speed.
“But there’s so much to do!”
So I figured I’d step in, be a bit more hands-on. I’ve done this stuff before, so sure; I can make some delivery roadmaps and set out timelines, and run Agile retrospectives, and write code and do showcases.
(You can probably see where this is going wrong)
Yeah, you can spin that so that it sounds like either reasonable or unreasonable at the same time. What I know for sure it that kept me super busy.
I figured I was helping, I was being busy, and I was prioritising.
Fast forward three months, and it’s all gone wrong. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little for dramatic effect.
We scraped in with the deadline – just a week overdue.
But it wasn’t comfortable, and we were in this awful position afterwards where we had a load of minor Incidents. Our first release worked, but it felt like every attempt to iterate or make a change would cause something else to break, and they broke because the quality and robustness of testing wasn’t there to avoid defects escaping into the wild and becoming a bigger problem.
My Role is to ensure this stuff isn’t a problem, and I’ve totally failed at that. I looked back at the time and thought, “I tried so hard, how could it fail like that”?
And I consoled myself with the mantra that: I was working on “the Most Important Thing”. But on reflection, I can see this isn’t the mantra I should be following.
Fortunately, experienced people stepped in and helped me take that step back and escape from my spiral of self-doubt.
Clearly, I was not working on the correct thing and not handling things properly.
When it comes to success,
Being busy is not the key.
Being more productive is not the key.
Working every available hour is not the key.
Trying to cover everyone else’s job roles is not the key.
The core parts of my role are setting the technical direction and upholding the quality standards of our output.
But there I was, I saw high priority stuff on the horizon, and I fell into the trap of trying to deal with it myself.
Doing the Most Important Thing is a Trap.
So, how do we choose what to work on? How do we know what’s best?
Well, there are a load of prioritisation techniques and frameworks out there.
One specifically that was introduced to me is called the Eisenhower matrix and I’m all into right now, but other options are available.
This one basically gets you to split tasks up by whether they’re important or urgent.
Urgent and Important you do now, without delay.
Not urgent and not important, you just don’t do.
Not urgent but important you schedule some time for, and
Not important but still urgent, you delegate, you hand over to someone else.
I called this talk “Doing the Most Important Thing” is a trap.
But I’ve since come to realise that, during this time, I was never working on the most important thing. I was working on the most urgent.
So many of those things I worked on were because they were the “most noisy” things, the things for the people who shouted loudest rather than the ones that were actually important.
And I am not someone by nature who shouts loudly. So I let my own priorities get drowned out by others.
When the team changed, and when new people came on board, what I didn’t do was delegate, and
what I didn’t do was schedule tasks, and plan time for the important-but-not-urgent stuff.
For me, this experience was a stark reminder that we, as Individual Contributors, are still part of a team and have got a role to play in that team.
Not everyone’s definition of the StaffPlus roles is the same, but you have to play your role, and prioritise your goals and your responsibilities.
How do we choose what to work on?
Do what you were actually hired to do, and play to your strengths.
Now, that doesn’t mean don’t do anything outside of your core role. I’m definitely not saying that.
The core parts of my role are setting the technical direction and upholding the quality standards of our output.
But there I was, I saw high priority stuff on the horizon, and I fell into the trap of trying to deal with it myself.
I didn’t relinquish control to others, and I didn’t let my newer leadership peers step into their roles.
I tried to help out elsewhere to get the project over the line, and in this process I lost my way and effectively abandoned those core tenets, letting them be compromised for the sake of short term delivery.
My role isn’t short term, it’s long term. And if I’m not here, being my own stakeholder for the long term, of course it’s going to go wrong.
Going back to that situation I mentioned at the start, what should I have done, with this lens in mind?
I focused entirely on this left-hand, “Urgent” column, for starters.
I stopped blocking out time to work on the equally-important, but not world-ending future stuff.
I stopped scheduling time and giving myself the mental space to look at the longer- term horizons. I stopped thinking long term.
Perhaps more critical though, I didn’t delegate.
This whole “Not Important” row at the bottom – that doesn’t literally mean “it’s not important”, but what it does mean is “Not Important for someone with your skill set” I should have delegated, and let go of a whole load of tasks that didn’t align with my core role, so that I could have that much more capacity to work on the important stuff.
Now, the challenges with prioritisation and everything else isn’t going to go away. There will always be these demands on you and the temptation to “help out”.
The first step to defeating that trap is to know that it’s there. It’s about knowing the pitfalls and the impact it can have.
For me, this means saying “No” a lot more.
Sometimes it’s to people who ask things from you. Most of the time it’s to myself.
It’s not a literal thing, or a being unhelpful thing.
Saying No to yourself that can be as simple as acknowledging that;
Yes, there’s a problem here, but also
No, I should not be the one to fix it.
No, I need to delegate this.
Doing “the Most Important Thing” isn’t wrong.
But sometimes it’s someone else’s problem, or someone else’s role to solve.
Prioritising based on general urgency or noise is a dangerous trap.
Understand your role, your responsibilities, and cover them first.
Tools like prioritisation matrixes and decision making frameworks can help with that, and teach you when to say no to things.
Presented at
StaffPlus London 2024,