8 Ways to Stop Being Crushed by Infinite Work
The better you get, the more work finds you. These skills help you survive success without losing your mind. Plus an early life lesson from my Dad.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I’m Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.
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When I was young, my dad was wrapping up his work one Saturday afternoon. He was (is) an attorney. It turns out when you bill by the hour that you end up working long hours. Which isn’t the point of this article, but I’m telling a story.
I remember asking him, “Are you done with your work?”
Which as a kid felt like a logical question, but as many adults are aware, it’s a loaded question.
I remember him laughing before replying. “No, I’m never done. I just decide when I’ve done enough for the day.”
That struck me as confusing. How could he never be done? At that age I had a bit of homework from school. I was either “not done” or “done.” The idea of leaving the office while there was still work to do was confusing.
He explained further. Something like this: “In adult work, there is an unlimited amount of work to do. I could work 24 hours a day for a year, and I’d never run out of work. I just try to get the most important stuff done, and I do as much as I can in a week.”
I think this story stuck with me because it revealed a confusing aspect of adult things. My dad lightly revealed a difference between kid life and adult life. But the real meaning behind it struck me as I got older and began my career.
I distinctly remember shortly after getting my first job suddenly realizing what my dad meant. There was indeed an infinite amount of work to do. It wasn’t like homework, where you could finish it. Or even studying for a test, where you could say that you’ve hit diminishing returns when you’ve studied enough.
Instead, work will consume anything you give it. This is true if you’re self-employed, or if you’re being sucked dry by a corporation (oooh, do I detect a little bitterness?). Either way, you can’t finish work.
Experience and work.
If it’s not already apparent to you, this problem only gets worse as you gain experience.
As a newly hired college student doing software engineering for the first time, I could always find something new to do. But that took mental effort. I remember spending a few months building a video game with a friend at work. Because we didn’t put in the mental effort to find something new to do.
As I became more senior, my list of obvious work passed infinity. Sure, the priority of work lower on that list was dubious. Rebuilding some random internal admin tool. Or renaming our confusing backup files.
However, over the years, I’ve found that the percentage of work I was able to complete continued to drop with my seniority.
By the time I hit senior manager at Amazon, I’d guess that I was rarely getting more than 10% of the way into my todo list. To put it another way, I could work an effective 24 hours a day, and I’d still barely scratch the surface of important work I could get done.
In my day to day work, I was barely skimming off the top most critical work, while leaving the bulk of my tasks undone (or delegated, cancelled, etc).
Yet, let’s pause for a second. Because some of your biggest opportunities at work come by saying an excited, “Yes! I have time!” when the right thing shows up.
This means you’re not only swamped by your normal work. But if you’re ambitious and effective at your job, you’re likely going to volunteer for even more work! It’s a little ridiculous.
What does this mean to all of you? As you gain in seniority, skill, respect, power, level at work, the amount of work you could do increases dramatically, while your ability to get work done stays stable (because you only have so many hours in a day). This means your ability to navigate your waterfall of infinite work becomes an all-important skill.
What do we do with this conundrum? Oh man, that’s such a good word. Anyway, let’s take a walk through the variety of tools we have at our disposal.
1. Cancel garbage work.
Before we approach ways of getting your work done, you need to be able to identify which work should be done.
As you get more senior, the responsibility of canceling work falls onto your plate more and more often. It’s reasonable for a new college hire to blindly do whatever they’re asked. Because I remember being a new college hire. I was a big dummy. You couldn’t rely on me to choose what work should be done.
However, it’s absolutely unreasonable for an experienced leader to do anything without knowing exactly why they’re doing it. More so, they should agree that this work should be done.
“I’m doing it because X person asked me to do it” must stop when you’ve left the junior employee stage of life. I’ve been guilty of saying that a few times, and I was appropriately slapped down each time.
This means that it’s your job to not just understand what work you are asked to do. You need to understand why the work is requested, the value of that work, the cost of the work, and then calculate if it’s worth the time involved.
Now here’s a big thing to keep in mind. This is about the opportunity cost, not about the actual cost.
“This engineer costs our company $250k a year, so that’s around $125 an hour. Yeah, this two hour project is worth $250!”
That’s not at all how business works. Projects are not allocated against your hourly rate. They’re allocated against the opportunity cost of other missed projects. In general, every employee makes a corporation multiples of what they are paid. A West coast software engineer might make $250k a year, but they’re likely earning their company more than a million a year (on average) from the work they’re completing. That’s how companies profit. They pay you less than you earn them. I mean, that’s the core of capitalism. Taking advantage of the peasants. Although it’s hard to call a software engineer making $250k+ a year a peasant.
The temptation is for people to defend the work by calling it valuable. “But this report would be so useful!”
That’s not the question. We’re questioning if it’s valuable enough to cancel other work. And that’s where garbage work fails.
How can you tell if work is garbage? That’s really up to you and your knowledge of your space. I saw complex scripts that someone wanted built that would be used by a single employee literally once. I saw new features requested to be built before anyone had validated in any way that the feature would be useful.
Once you’ve decided that you don’t think a project is worth the time, you really don’t want to dodge it, or hand it off to someone else. Killing it is the honest and right thing to do. That means bringing up your concerns about the value (because who knows, maybe you’re wrong because you missed something).
Will that hurt someone’s feelings? Frequently yes.
That means you’ll need to figure out how to be diplomatic, and fact based.
“It’s my understanding that you’re the only confirmed user of this tool?”
“Do we have funding for this project yet, or is it still pending approval?”
“Sorry, I’d love to help you. But we have a large load of projects already, and they’re all higher priority than this right now. Let my manager know if you disagree with this project priority.”
(Sometimes booting things to your manager is a good way to make people go away.)
Anyway, the most efficient way to solve too much work is to not ever do the work.
Almost always work in priority order.
This should be obvious. But so many people screw this up. You know the Eisenhower Matrix? I swear many people start in the urgent quadrant, and just work their way through everything urgent. Ignoring actual priority.
“They need this report soon.”
“They need this email soon.”
”I need to attend this meeting soon.”
Yeah sure, lots of things are urgent. But urgency and priority are absolutely not the same thing.
Instead of defaulting to work on urgent things, you should default to work on only your highest priority projects. Many of these will not be urgent at all. And that’s fine. Because you’re contributing to your highest priority work. And that will almost always be the best way you can contribute.
This means plenty of urgent and not-important work will fall on the ground, and miss a deadline. And again, urgent doesn’t mean important. This is a good way to think about meetings as well. Meetings are almost the definition of urgent (because they’re scheduled for a specific time each day), and many of them are not important. Skipping a meeting to do some important work is an excellent definition of focusing on your priorities.
Plenty of deadlines are fake at work. You need to be able to pressure test those deadlines, so you can be efficient on that important work.
“It is critical you fill out the impact study for the security team by Friday.”
You don’t know how many notices like that I ignored over my career. Random team requests random time consuming task. It sounds fancy and urgent. But unless I’m convinced that the impact study is actually valuable to the company, I’m not going to stop working on my highest priority work.
And sometimes those impact study requests go away. And sometimes my manager tells me that I’m overdue for my impact study, and it’s making them look bad. And so I do it. Because let’s be practical about things.
But anyway, your default should be to do only your highest priority work. And then you can consider the urgency of that work to consider slightly changing the order you work on things.