Setting Expectations And Being Accountable

I came across this posting tonight, via Scott Hanselman's riff on it, and it really got me thinking. In a nutshell, the postings talk about how life has changed over the past decade or so due to the broad acceptance of new technologies (email, voicemail, DVRs, RSS, etc), resulting in increased pressure on people to act on information as it becomes available, lest it pile up ominously.

I'll readily admit that I've often found myself in the past to be behind by a few voicemails, a few tens of DVR hours, a few hundred emails, a few thousand RSS items, etc. In fact, I'll bet most people feel the pressure to act and react to their open channels every second on a daily basis. However, I feel I've managed to find a pretty useful solution to this problem: saying “no” early and often.

Don't get me wrong--if you send me an email that expects a response, you'll get it. If I record TV I want to watch, I will. If you leave me a voicemail, I'll call you back. I think that saying "no" is a critical skill, but one that must be used preemptively.

At SharpLogic, I take on many different responsibilities that sometimes have complex interdependencies and are almost always "important" or "critical" (8+ on a 10 point scale). Every day I find myself with more than enough work to do, and it seems like there's always a ton of projects in the pipeline, which range from customer engagements to network maintenance to accounting to recruiting and so on. Some responsibilities are more important than others. However, every responsibility is still necessary.

One common thing I hear from people is "if I didn't reply to your message from last week, resend it because I delete all mail that's 10 days old". While this attitude may be fine among friends, it's completely unacceptable to a client.

Clients come to us with problems they need solved. In most cases, the problems range beyond software design to require a marketing perspective, and they also often necessitate a level of business consulting. They have tight deadlines (sometimes extremely tight) and, of course, need high quality results.

Sure, this might all sound common, so why do they come to us?

Results. I like to think of SharpLogic as Harvey Kietel’s character Winston Wolfe from Pulp Fiction (if you don’t know who that is, go see the movie).

When someone approaches us, they’re not looking for implementation of a spec. There probably isn’t even a spec. In fact, there probably isn’t even an identified solution. Clients come to us with problems—problems they want to “go away”. They want someone else to think about the problem, analyze the options, determine the best course of action, and deliver a proposal that minimizes the amount of time and effort they need to invest for the results to be delivered. The last thing they need from us is to be filling up their voicemail and email inboxes with tons of micromanagement administrivia. If we’re putting them in a position to say “no” to our requests, we’re part of the problem to begin with.

I know this is starting to sound like a commercial for the company, but I actually do have a point: I say “no” a lot.

In order to ensure our ability to deliver for customers, it’s necessary to be sure we have the time and resources available. If we don’t have time and resources, we won’t take on the project. There’s nothing worse than saying “no” to a customer after you’ve said “yes”—so avoid the problem by undercommitting, underpromising, and overdelivering.

These days my inbox rarely exceeds 25 “action required” items. I occassionally get voicemails, but they're usually some Silicon Valley startup trying to get me to resell their SharePoint Pong clone. Overall, it’s actually very easy to stay on top of everything if you scope “everything” down to a manageable size.

On a related note, I used to always wonder why people who are always “slammed” (way behind in work) ever got promoted. Then it occurred to me that the easiest way to undercommit, underpromise, and overdeliver is to always say you’re slammed. While I understand the motivation, it’s never been a strategy I’ve felt comfortable with since it lowers the confidence your peers have in you. However, it is an interesting, somewhat Darwinian, evolutionary mechanism that evolves the modern information worker. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out.

If you find yourself constantly slammed, you need to ask yourself whether or not you're overcommitted. I wish there was an easy formula to figure this out, but there isn't. While it would be great to get Outlook to automatically delete emails you'd end up deleting anyway, perhaps a better solution is to figure out why you're getting those emails in the first place. Sure, there's always unavoidable spam (both anonymous and from people who should know better), but there is also a level of personal accountability required to resolve the disease, not just the symptom. Sometimes people overcommit without realizing it (like the 35 Futurama episodes on my Media Center) or have a passive aggressive need for control (100+ RSS subscriptions ). Being overcommitted is awful and doesn't help anyone, especially those who rely on your committments only to have them broken.

5/17/2006 1:01:26 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]