The fundamental difference between smart people and wise people. Smart people reach answers fast without much consideration of alternatives, and who have amazing ability to justify anything, using their big brains. Wise people who know they are often wrong, and so can admit and learn from their mistakes, take more time to make decisions when it is not an emergency, and generally come to better solutions if they are not working. Think of the difference between oh so smart Henry Kissinger and Cho En Lai who ran rings around him when Nixon went to China for example, or in business between the ever self justifying Alan Greenspan and Alan Mullaly who actually turned round Boeing and Ford. It is better to be wise than smart. Of course the wise people also have learned the sort of lessons Edmond Lau has posted, who sounds wise and I would only add admit and learn from mistakes as a specific tool to combine with his list.
Edmond Lau, Quora Engineer
Focus on high-leverage activities. Leverage is defined as the amount of output or impact produced per unit of time spent.
This lesson applies regardless of whether you love to spend many waking hours working or whether you're a subscriber of Tim Ferris's 4-Hour Work Week philosophy [1]. At some point, you'll realize that there's more work to be done than you have time available, and you'll need to prioritize what to get done. Leverage should be the central, guiding metric that helps you determine where to focus your time.
Another rule of thumb for thinking about leverage is to consider the commonly mentioned Pareto principle [2] or the 80-20 rule -- the idea that 80% of the contributions or impact come from 20% of the effort. That 20% of work consists of the highest leverage activities. The 4-Hour Work Week philosophy requires taking this to the extreme -- assuming a normal 40-hour work week, what's the 10% of effort (4 hours) that you can do to achieve most of the gains?
By definition, your leverage, and hence productivity, can be increased in three ways [3]:
[1] http://www.fourhourworkwe
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/w
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Hig
[4] https://www.stephencovey.
[5] Tips & Hacks for Everyday Life: What are the top three effectiveness strategies you use?
This lesson applies regardless of whether you love to spend many waking hours working or whether you're a subscriber of Tim Ferris's 4-Hour Work Week philosophy [1]. At some point, you'll realize that there's more work to be done than you have time available, and you'll need to prioritize what to get done. Leverage should be the central, guiding metric that helps you determine where to focus your time.
Another rule of thumb for thinking about leverage is to consider the commonly mentioned Pareto principle [2] or the 80-20 rule -- the idea that 80% of the contributions or impact come from 20% of the effort. That 20% of work consists of the highest leverage activities. The 4-Hour Work Week philosophy requires taking this to the extreme -- assuming a normal 40-hour work week, what's the 10% of effort (4 hours) that you can do to achieve most of the gains?
By definition, your leverage, and hence productivity, can be increased in three ways [3]:
- By reducing the time it takes to complete a certain activity.
- By increasing the impact of a particular activity.
- By shifting to higher leverage activities.
- Mentoring new hires. Mentoring (and really managing) is an extremely high-leverage activity. Over the course of a year, an employee will spend somewhere between 1880 to 2820 hours working (assuming 47 work-weeks and somewhere between 40-60 hours per week working). Spending 1 hour every day for a month (20 hours) mentoring or training a new hire may seem like a lot of time, but it represents only about 1% of the total time the new hire will spend working his/her first year and yet can have a significant influence over the productivity and effectiveness on the other 99% of those hours.
- Building tools and automating repetitive work. Coming from a software engineering background, one high-leverage activity that I tend to do is to build tools that reduce manual, repetitive work. I'm a little biased, but I'm a firm believer that everyone would benefit knowing a little bit about coding (see Computer Programming: Should most young people learn to code?), primarily because there are many fields not traditionally associated with computer science where a mindset of automation would have huge efficiency gains. Don't do what a machine can do for you.
- Invest in learning and in continuously improving. This falls in the bucket of "important and not urgent" tasks that Steven Covey describes in his time management matrix in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People [4, 5]. Learning never seems like an urgent task, and it's easy -- if you don't budget time for it -- to allow unimportant interruptions to dictate your schedule. However, learning is what lets you improve your work productivity and increase the opportunities available, so it's a big high-leverage activity.
- Actively prioritizing tasks based on estimated impact. I'm currently working on user growth at Quora, and there are probably hundreds of things that I could consider working on at any given time that might move our metrics up and to the right. Deciding what I should work on next that would be the highest impact requires regularly reviewing (I try to do this at least weekly) what needs to get done and having the data to guide the decision-making.
- Holding tech talks and writing guides to bring new hires on board. At Quora, we've recently started having each new hire go through a series of tech talks and also assembled a set of codelabs. Inspired by Google's training regimen, codelabs are documents that explain core software abstractions and concepts that we use, discuss the rationale for why we designed and used them, walk through the relevant code in the codebase, and provide a set of exercises to solidify understanding. These took many people on the team many hours to write, but they provide a scalable and reusable resource that allow new hires to start on a consistent foundation and cut down the amount of time that each individual mentor needs to spend teaching the same concepts.
- Pushing back on meetings without an agenda or meetings that you don't really need to be a part of. Poorly run meetings are negative leverage because they waste people's time. Avoid those. A corollary to this is defining and setting agendas for meetings that you hold so that you don't waste other people's time.
- Spending time on interviews and improving interview processes. Conducting interviews is a huge amount of work. Interviews interrupt your workday, and the hours spent talking with candidates, writing up feedback, and debriefing all add up to considerable amounts. However, making sure that we're hiring the right people, that we have a good process in place, and that people we hire are people that I would be excited to work with is essential to building a strong team and a strong product. There have been many weeks where I've interviewed 4 candidates per week, and I think my personal record during the height of the recruiting season was doing 20 interviews in 20 consecutive workdays.
- Using open-source tools when they meet your needs. There's no sense in re-inventing the wheel if someone else has already built what you need.
[1] http://www.fourhourworkwe
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/w
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Hig
[4] https://www.stephencovey.
[5] Tips & Hacks for Everyday Life: What are the top three effectiveness strategies you use?
No comments:
Post a Comment