Want to improve your productivity and that of your team? Imagine that you’re playing ping pong. When someone hits a ball on to your side of the table, do as much work as you need to so you can hit the ball back over the net and your counterpart can continue playing. Don’t let lots of balls pile up on your side of the net!
Be a Catalyst, Not a Bottleneck
On your team, you can be a catalyst or a bottleneck. A catalyst is someone who speeds up the rate at which other people around them are working by unblocking them, focusing them on the right things, and enabling them to move faster. A bottleneck is someone who slows down other people by letting lots of issues pile up on their desk and taking a long time before resolving each one. By using the mental image of playing ping pong, you can remind yourself to be a catalyst, not a bottleneck. Think of each issue waiting for your response or decision as a ping pong ball. When someone brings you an issue, asks you a question, asks you to make a decision, or brings you a work item that is appropriately your responsibility, they have just hit the ping pong ball over the net on to your side of the table. If you can resolve the issue completely and “take the ball off the table,” of course do so. Otherwise, your mission is to do your part and as quickly as possible hit the ball back over the net to someone else so that they can keep playing instead of waiting for you to hit the ball back.
Product and project managers are at especially high risk of becoming a bottleneck because many other parts of the organization depend on them and can’t take various actions (starting work on a feature or not, scheduling a bug for a fix or not, committing to deliver functionality in a specific timeframe to enable a customer win, etc.) until product or project management does something or decides something. Product and project managers also have diverse action items that take various lengths of time to accomplish, so they are especially vulnerable to becoming swamped if they don’t manage their time carefully.
Parallelize Your Team
Putting torpedoes in the water is a related metaphor. Think of each person in your organization who you can get going on a different issue as a torpedo. Imagine you’re a submarine commander who has only one working launch tube and has torpedoes that take varying lengths of time to prepare for launch. Let’s say you have five torpedoes that take 10, 10, 15, 30, and 60 seconds to launch and it will take 60 seconds for each torpedo to reach its target. In what order do you launch the torpedoes? Do you launch the one that takes 60 seconds first, keeping all the other torpedoes (and target ships) waiting? No. You fire the torpedoes that take the least time to launch first so you get as many “fish in the water” at once as possible. That way you’ll sink more ships faster. You want to parallelize your activities and your organization as much as possible instead of keeping people waiting on you in a serial fashion. “If you can get someone else unblocked quickly, do it now” is the social, organizational equivalent of the Getting Things Done personal productivity principle “If it takes two minutes or less, do it now.”
Of course, time to accomplish each action item is by no means the only criterion for determining the order you do things. It’s vitally important to understand how intrinsically important each item is (will it double your company’s value or make no difference?) and how time-sensitive it is (must you act now, or can it wait?). Read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People if you haven’t already. But other things such as an issue’s importance or urgency being equal, in deciding what to do first, you also want to be asking yourself “How can I empower the most other people in my organization to get going as quickly as possible?” Instead of the two-dimensional model of importance and urgency in “Seven Habits,” use a three-dimensional model of importance, urgency, and time required to get others moving.
Don’t let lots of issues pile up on your desk unaddressed and unresolved. As General George S. Patton said, “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” Be a catalyst, not a bottleneck. Get out of the way and enable your team to start executing today!
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