“Daniel Dravot, Esquire. Well, he became king of Kafiristan, with a crown on his head and that’s all there is to tell. I’ll be on my way now sir, I’ve got urgent business in the south, I have to meet a man in Marwar Junction.” – The Man Who Would Be King
Well, maybe not this doctor.
I have a friend that I’ll call “Joe”. Mainly I’ll call him “Joe” because that’s his name. Since there are estimated to be 1,782,432 people in the United States named “Joseph” that’s really not blowing his cover, except to (I think) two readers. And, no, his wife’s name isn’t Mary.
Joe is fantastically smart. He has an intelligence that makes correlation leaps that catch most people by surprise. In one instance he pointed out a basic physics flaw that showed a billion-dollar business deal was destined to fail. The company did the deal anyway. Physics won – physics always wins.
Joe had been right. You’d think that being right about a fatal flaw in a billion-dollar business would be rewarded, that Joe would be sought after for advice.
If you think that, you’ve never worked in the corporate world. Being right about something like that means that an executive was wrong. Executives never like to have people around them that remind them of when they turned $1,000,000,000 into $100,000,000.
There are times it doesn’t pay to be smarter than the boss.
My boss caught me taking NSFW selfies. They’re serious about mask-wearing.
Besides being right when an executive was wrong, one problem that Joe had is that he had a fairly high capacity to do work. Normally that would be a good thing, but most work was routine for Joe. When he and I were working as peers, he would often do no work at all for days on end.
None. He’d goof off all day, or just play and experiment. He’d break the software in his computer just to see if he could fix it.
Then, in a furious burst of energy (often before a deadline) he’d work. Sometimes, the work would last through multiple 20 hour days.
“Joe, you realize that you could have done that work last week when you were trying to get unauthorized access to the company’s main software server and setting up an unsanctioned private e-mail just for the group. Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“That would be boring,” Joe responded, “so I waited until I didn’t think I’d be able to do the work on time and that I’d miss the deadline. Then it got interesting.”
I got pulled over while going to work with my loom in the front seat. The cop said I was weaving all over the road.
In truth, I’d seen some of the same characteristics of creative procrastination in me, so I immediately understood what Joe was saying. The work itself was rather routine, so the way to bring challenge was to wait until the real risk of losing my job led to peak production. I had a mortgage and Joe didn’t, so I didn’t fly nearly as close to the flame.
But that’s not the only kind of job there is out there.
On the other end of the spectrum is a job that’s chaos. Everything is an emergency. Everything is urgent.
Priorities keep shifting on a daily basis – sometimes on an hourly basis. It feels like there’s no end to the work, and the pressure is unrelenting. There are long lists of things that have to be done – now. The previous day’s plan gets thrown into the trash due to the events of today.
Well, that’s not a job that’s boring.
Don’t worry – they got jobs with Elon Musk, so they could go to otter space.
Lose a day on a job like that, and it feels like the business might implode. I once told The Mrs., “I can do any job for two years.” I had that particular chaotic job for 32 months. 32 months really was 8 months too long – there are only so many 70 hour weeks that I could do consecutively and not become as mentally vacant as Joe Biden circa 2021.
An example from my time in ChaosCorp®: on Sunday around noon when I just started to feel normal, I’d realize that tomorrow was Monday, and I’d have to go back to work. Goodbye feeling normal. I knew there would be some fresh crisis on Monday, I just didn’t know what it would be this week.
This was a time when life was too interesting.
Perhaps, though, there was another way?
Going into my Wayback® Machine, I actually created a picture that I can use to illustrate this. This is from a post back in 2018 (Franklin, Planners, The Terminator, My Unlikely But Real Link With President Eisenhower, Star Wars, and Kanban):
Gotta love Microsoft® Paint™, making a $500 computer just as effective as a box of Crayons® and a sheet of construction paper (plus a sticker).
In this particular graph, one axis shows how important a task is, and the other how urgent. We’ll skip the unimportant stuff, and only focus on the two boxes on the right side of the graph:
Important and Urgent, and Important and Not-Urgent.
The job I described above where everything was chaos? Almost all of our work was Important and Urgent. It’s the kind of work that causes people to get ulcers, gray hair, a facial tic, and start muttering to themselves when they’re hanging out by the coffee machine.
That was me for thirty months.
The “boring” first job I described? That was one where almost all of our work was Important and Not Urgent. This was reasonable work that was really important, but we had sensible timelines. Being generally Type-A personalities, there wasn’t enough pressure for Joe (and me), so we had to invent it ourselves.
Recently, though, I’ve come on a revelation: the optimum amount of work types (for me) is probably about 80% Important and Not Urgent and 20% Important and Urgent.
Pareto would be proud of that blend.
I tried to put my dog on a vegan diet, but we ran out of vegans.
The nice thing about Important and Urgent work is that it gets me going. Rather than get to work and plan about the plan I need to schedule to put the Important and Not Urgent work together, Important and Urgent work has to be done. Now. It has immediacy. It gets me going. Once I get momentum and a pace going, well, it’s easy to keep it going.
Then I get the Important and Not Urgent work done.
The great thing about a day with a good mixture of work like that is that, at the end, my productivity is nearly maximum. As I get in the car to go home, I realize that, yeah, I really did give it all at work, and it felt pretty good.
But writing these posts? That’s Important and Not Urgent. Until I wait to 11PM to get started on writing, like I did tonight.
Then writing becomes Important and Urgent.
Joe would be proud.
Hey, look, the Sun is coming up . . . .