Garrick van Buren

In CBS’s world adventure race program ‘The Amazing Race’ there’s a game element called the ‘Detour’. The ‘Detour’ is a team activity requiring completion before continuing on the race itself. Each ‘Detour’ includes two activities – each team needs to select one from an opaque two- or three-word description of each.

The goal is to complete the selected, obscure activity quickly and continue racing to that leg’s pitstop – and not be the last team arriving. For, as Phil says at the beginning of each leg, “The last team may be eliminated”. 
The vast majority of teams select their activity, complete it with some level of difficulty, and continue on. A few teams struggle so substantially that they decide to cut their losses on the initially selected activity and switch to the other activity. With this decision they’re betting that, even with the additional time cost of transporting themselves to the new activity and figuring out what it is, they’ll complete it more quickly than continued attempts at the initial activity. Mathematically, the odds are against them. Each minute they spent on switching (transitioning out of the first activity and into the second – both physically and mentally) could have been spent on another attempt to successfully complete the first activity. 

“…An old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.” – Abraham Lincoln.

While the costs of switching are substantial and obvious from the armchair, they’ll more invisible and subtle in the banality of our own lives. We pay switching costs in; time commuting, time moving between meeting rooms, time switching between projects, time switching between different kinds of activities all from the same swivel office chair. It doesn’t matter if these activities are two equally important projects, a project and email, a project and an unexpected interruption by a co-worker, a project and a Facebook notification. Each switch delays the completion of the initial task by diffusing available mental energy. Across a team of any size these individually invisible minutes quietly evaporate hours and days. 

This is horribly unfortunate considering the entire purpose of a firm, of a company with employees in a centralized office, is to minimize these switching costs. It’s a promise that if everyone is in the same office at the same time, day in, day out, and applying effort in the same direction then coordination, collaboration will be easier and business value will more likely be captured than would be with a distributed group of solo practitioners. 

Unfortunately, the promise is not always fulfilled. Today’s corporate environments are chockfull of switching costs; sudden interruptions, unanticipated ‘urgent’ meetings, multiple high priority efforts running concurrently within the same team. Each response, each pull from focus, subtly and imperceptibly subtracting from the available time to do the work, across teams, across departments.  

I first felt the pain of switching costs early in my independent career where I, far too late, realized I could sell the work or I could do the work I sold – but I couldn’t do both in the same day. Not that I didn’t try, time and time again. Each time I tried, found myself mentally stuck halfway between the two contexts – completely unsure where I left off or what I needed to do next. I was paralyzed – watching the hours melt away. 

Since that time, I’ve found 5 strategies to dramatically minimize losing time to switching costs:

1.  Schedule work of the same tightly-defined context into a single uninterrupted timeblock. 
 Think of contexts as singular ‘trains of thought’ that you want arrive at the station as quickly as possible. Anything slowing the train down is likely a different context. Schedule that context separately and distinctly.
The expectation of supporting two very different contexts simultaneously is not unique to solo practitioners (e.g. selling/working as I described above) – it’s also surprisingly common in the corporate world. A member of a management team I work with stacks their 1:1 team meetings three-deep at 1pm everyday. Same kind of conversation, same kind of energy, same time each day. 

Some of my clients alternate days of the week for individual projects; Monday for Project Alpha, Tuesday for Project Beta, Wednesday back to Project Alpha etc. This ensures a fixed day-long context for each project, uninterrupted by the others. This is the only definition of multitasking that I’ve found to be both productive & sustainable. The in-between day also bakes-in the creative benefit of stepping away and returning with fresh eyes. 

Processing messages (email, voicemail, snail mail), replying to them, and doing the work they describe is in fact three contexts masquerading as one. Break them up and schedule them accordingly – yes I regularly have appointments on my calendar like, “reply to John’s email about research questions.” This also means only checking inboxes at the appointed time – for even tabbing into the inbox risks a switching cost. 

2. Schedule your interruptions.
I hear audible disbelief every time I suggest interruptions can be scheduled. There are a number of ways to do it.

The first is eliminating visual and auditory interruptions from devices (i.e. silence your phone). One of my clients always has their phone on silent. Always. Has for years. My phone (Motorola Pure X) automatically silences itself when there’s an appointment on my calendar. It won’t ring if I’m in a client meeting or deep into project work (for both are scheduled).

Extending beyond needy devices, college professors for years have had ‘office hours’ – scheduled time where they expect to be interrupted by needy students. In recent years that notion has extended into the venture capital realm. Recently, in an effort to reduce interruption and stay focused on a substantial, strategic project, one of my client teams has instituted weekly ‘office hours’. To date it has wholly eliminated interruption outside of those pre-defined hours. Presuming you start with a couple sessions a week, it’s rare the issue is so pressing it can’t wait a day or two. 

If you don’t yet feel comfortable with scheduled office hours, a first step in that direction would be to encourage your reports to explain their problem to a rubber duck before bringing it to you (the problem, they’ll need the duck later). Too often our knee-jerk response is to add another person to a problem – when what we really need is to fully describe the problem out-loud and without interruption (oh, the irony). 

3. Find the best location for each context – maximize your time there.
I meet my best clients outside their office, for we’ve found that stepping slightly outside those familiar four walls helps our conversation stay focused on solving tomorrow’s challenges, not today’s urgency. I regularly stack appointments in the same neighborhood, sometimes even the same restaurant or coffee shop. This minimizes overall transportation costs. Back, when I worked more on-site, when I had a conversation unrelated to that specific client’s project – even if it was with a different buyer at the same company – it was far easier to focus our conversation out of the office (out of the office is likely where your best work happens anyway). 
Similarly, just as there is some work that’s best done in front of the screen, some work is done best completely away from the screen. Maybe your best thinking comes from staring out across Silver Lake. Then schedule your thinking there – not feeling trapped in a dark, cramped office overlooking the city bus garage. Don’t rush back after you found the answer you were looking for. Linger, find one or two more. Your brain just got warmed up.  If ‘where’ you work includes the tools you’re using, my best thinking usually comes from one of two places; three-pages handwritten, or one of my four 36″ * 48″ whiteboards.  

4. Minimize commutes.
Traffic is one of the most challenging things to consistently estimate. If Scheduling was a superhero, Traffic would be the arch-enemy. An easy 20-minute trip always has the potential to suddenly and unexpectedly take 60 minutes for visible reason. Doesn’t matter if you’re traveling by car, bus, airplane, or bicycle. Each mode has this risk. Effectively and consistently accounting for travel time for any distance over five miles makes minimizing switching costs a challenge. One way is to travel outside of peak hours. Here in the midwest that often means planning to arrive at the office before 8am – which is great if the intention is to get ahead of the afternoon rush hour and arrive home before 4pm. Unfortunately, it too often becomes 7pm. 
Another method is to shorten the commute either in distance or in frequency – this is where working from home (or within walking distance of home) all or some part of the week is beneficial. The people I work with are always surprised and delightful how much can be accomplished when a regular commute is swapped for actual doing. The world is a touch easier with when your schedule is ever so slightly out of sync with the rest of the world. Breakfast with the family is completely worth it. Target at 2pm is completely worth it. The DMV at 8am is completely worth it. 

Commutes come in all sizes. Today, look for those little commutes you do regularly. Maybe it’s walking across the building to the printer. Maybe it’s an elevator ride or two, next time you’re doing it – ask yourself, ‘How can I retain the benefits of this trip while minimizing the switching costs?’

5. Schedule your switches and fuel through them. 
You can deliberately schedule your transitions. You can add margins to your commitments.
While our digital calendars allow us to specify travel time to a commitment, travel time from a commitment is a little trickier. You could schedule an appointment (‘travel from x to y’). As a way of universally solving this across all my commitments, I leave 15-30 minutes of white space between commitments. While not ideal (protecting white space requires constant vigilance – both to ensure it doesn’t evaporate and remembering why it’s there) it has made transitions far easier. Even with this small technique you can see how quickly context switches can chew up your day – 15-minute transitions on either side of a 30-minute conversation turns it into a 1 hour commitment. If you include even a paltry 30-minutes of prep & follow-up, the same phenomenon invisibly turns a 1-hour conversation into a 3-hour commitment. It’s all these invisible parts of ensuring commitments are successful that we underestimate when we make the commitment. 

Even the smallest transition, say from working on a screen to face-to-face conversation is a context switch requiring a deliberate transition. Give yourself 15-minutes to come to a complete stop out of one context and prepare for another (hat tip Jamie Thingelstad). During the transition – grab a glass of water and some quality fuel (e.g. a handful of fruit, veg, nuts). 

6. Make fewer commitments. 
Fewer commitments inherently means fewer switching costs. It also means more time to ensuring the commitments you do make are as wildly successful as they can be. Not every discomfort needs to be resolved. Not every discomfort needs to be resolved now. Say ‘No’ more. Decline more. Delegate more. The time & mental space you open up by eliminating the work you don’t want to do will inevitably be filled by the work you do. As my good friend Patrick Rhone says, “Saying ‘No’ is saying ‘Yes’ to other things.”

As I write this, I’m slowly, steadily, recovering from a running injury. Pain so bad in my right knee that it’s painful to walk and stand. A visit to the sports chiropractor diagnosed the problem as a lack of flexibility in my left hip. The right-side of my body continually compensated for this lack of flexibility, and boom, knee pain. 
The sports doc said we could simply focus my recovery efforts on increasing my hip flexibility and eventually the immediate knee pain will subside enough to comfortably run again. Conversely, just relieving my short-term knee pain today means it’ll return tomorrow and the day after. In the interest of getting me running pain-free sooner rather than later, we’re going to work on Both.

In my conversations with leadership, I find some leaders have their focus on the distant horizon – 18 months out or further. Others are completely swallowed up by the weeds of day-to-day operations. Each neglecting the other horizon. There are a few, like my sports doc, that know the most sustainable results come from simultaneously working the short- & long-term horizons. In fact, working both simultaneously is the only way to make the long-term goals stick and the day-to-day tolerable. 

Both isn’t just in our business lives as leaders. 

Both is in our lives as a whole. 

Each day we need to fuel and rest. These day-to-day operations needs may crowd out hours achieving our long-term goals, yet without food & sleep we’re in no condition to work. We have dreams and we need groceries. Both. 

As I wrote in Rebuilding Blocks:

“Laundry, groceries, housekeeping, commutes, errands, entertainment, the constant maintenance of banality—all short game. Yes, they can bring a lot of joy and drama to our lives. Yes, not taking care of them appropriately and effectively makes achieving our intended goals more tenuous—that’s the definition of short game. The long game: satisfying relationships with family and friends, meaningful work, fulfilling avocations—these things take decades to achieve. These things require persistence, discretionary time, and time free of short game.”

The underlying deceit of advocating a singular focus to improve productivity overlooks our world of Both. Our brains find periods of intense, challenging work satisfying. Our brains also thrive on periods of downtime, enjoying some degree of boredom on a regular basis, not to mention sleep. Both. 

Both is the person laying the foundation for their new business while still a full-time employee. Both is knowing that your next opportunity may be at your current company – or not. 

The small day-to-day tasks – the things that we’re currently using as an excuse is for not moving forward on the big, meaningful, long-term work – will persist and multiply if we allow it.

Worse, executing superbly on them doesn’t prevent them from returning (e.g. relieving my knee pain). Done is temporary. Nor does small stuff provide any leverage with the big stuff (e.g. solving my knee pain doesn’t fix my underlying body mechanics problem). Conversely, an amazing 18-month strategy is meaningless if it can’t be supported by day-to-day operations (Oh, did I mention I’m registered for another marathon and I can barely run one mile). This is why Both.

Take a look at your agenda for next week.

Does it have more of a short-term or more of a long-term horizon?

Which horizon, if you dedicated just 60 minutes to improving could you improve? 

Schedule that today. 

It’s the first week of a January 2017.

I’d like to raise a glass of my homebrew to the new year.

When I crack open the bottle and pour it gently, perfectly into a glass half the size of the bottle, it’ll be brilliantly clear. So clear you can see the other side of the room through the beer. For the vast majority of beer styles, this brilliant clarity is the goal. In homebrew competitions this brilliant clarity is often what moves a beer into the second round of judging. Despite appearance accounting for three of 50 points. Now, if I grab a second glass and poured the remainder of the bottle in it, the second glass is likely going to be cloudy, hazy, and in at least one case – murky. In competitions, it’s this glass the second round judges are evaluating. It’s in this second round evaluation where the judging is more critical, the faults weighed heavier. This is where winners are declared. This is where everything matters more including appearance. Yet, this is where I regularly present the worst half of a beer.

This phenomenon of performing worse when it matters more isn’t unique to my homebrewing or even homebrewing. It’s also the consistent story – as you read in Rebuilding Blocks – of my kubb team’s experience at the US National Kubb Championship. We’d handily win the group play and position ourselves well in for the more competitive bracket play. Unfortunately, it’s here in these more competitive matches where our performance falls apart because we’re fatigued from playing too hard, too intensely in the early rounds. In the heat of the Eau Claire summer sun this past July, I had the epiphany, “kubb is an endurance sport.”

Like I said, this isn’t unique to homebrewing. Or kubb for that matter.

The gym air is filled with freshly declared resolutions. There’s a renewed optimism, a renewed enthusiasm, to achieve a new level of success. At the office, new strategic initiatives – and their respective clusters of projects – are kicking off (I know cause we’ve been working on them since Sept). It’s tempting to go into these new efforts with the throttle fully open. It’s tempting to overload this quarter, this month, this week with every success and performance metric for the year. Often however, it’s these early stages where we have the least information about the actual, specific, detailed challenges to our success, where we have the least structural support for our progress, and we simultaneously have the greatest chance of fatigue and burn out. This temptation, here in this first breath of the new year is in many ways self-sabotage. Perhaps counter-intuitively the best thing we can do is temper our enthusiasm for the new, under-committing, and celebrating the small, early, steady wins.

There’s going to be a second quarter. There’s going to be a second half of the year. Let’s position ourselves to be able to perform then with the same level of enthusiasm we have now. This means, rather than launching 34 brand new projects this week, launching three of the most well-understood, most foundational initiatives across January. Then, with laser focus, making clear, steady, progress on them throughout the quarter. Then kicking off the next three. Repeat.

The only way for me to sustainably put the clear beer on the bottom half of the bottle is to improve my process for pulling more yeast out of suspension prior to bottling. The only way to sustainably make deeper into the U.S. National Kubb Championship bracket is to play well with more ease. This improves the early rounds and the subsequent rounds. The way to sustainably kick this year off is to focus on fewer and more foundational efforts.

Your email inbox is one thing.

Other than turning the spam filter to 11, having an unguessable address, and or sending everything to dev/null – if you have an email address – it’s going to receive email. Your email inbox is, painfully, for others.
You’re calendar is something completely different.

Nothing goes on your calendar without you explicitly accepting it and – at least implicitly – committing to it.

Yet, if you ask anyone – anywhere on the corporate ladder – if they have a commitment today, this week, or even this month (!) that’s just for them, selfishly, guiltlessly, just for them, for their fulfillment, their response is likely:

“I can do that?”

or, slightly the better

“I’ve tried that. It always gets bumped by someone else’s meeting request.”

The need doesn’t go away. It just manifests itself in sneaky and unhealthy ways. People I’ve spoken with have confessed to blocking off afternoons in fictitious conference rooms (CC 86) with fictitious people (Mr. Nunyobizniz) just so they can get some actual, focused, uninterrupted, work done. They’ve taken a day off, to ensure no one expects them to respond.

They’ve found all to often, the moment there’s an opening in their schedule they’ll receive an absolutely-urgent meeting request. If it’s outright declined – the sender will be at their desk insisting upon acceptance. It says you’re available!

A damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t scenario.

What to do?

First – explicitly schedule that solo work – and protect it. Just as you would your most important meeting. It is an even greater commitment.
I know. That sounds somehow strange and counterintuitive.

It’s as if we’ve been taught meetings with others belong on the calendar but not our commitments. The project status meetings are scheduled but not the work in-between them. It’s as if 9-5 is open season for meetings and the actual work must happen outside of those hours. It’s as if serving others is always more important than completing the work we we’ve been hired for.

This is one of the ancillary benefits of the scheduling (and keeping!) your Bi-Weekly Preview. It preemptively closes these open spaces in the calendar week-after-week-after-week. It asks you to answer the following question for each unscheduled hour:

“What’s the most significant thing I can do at this time with the energy I honestly anticipate having?”

Perhaps;
– prep or recap time for those important meetings with others (a significant step in making meetings more effective).
– the solo work that you’ve mentally pencilled-in, but haven’t actually committed to by scheduling it.
– a visit to your favorite art gallery.
– a leisurely walk down the riverfront and back.
– a game of solo kubb.
– the first step in that project you keep putting off (if it’s considering why you keep putting it off).
– exploring a new tool or technique that could substantially improve your everyday work.
– staring across the Endless Bridge envisioning where you and your team will be this time next year.

You get the idea.

These are just some of the things you have guilt-free permission to schedule into your work day this week. The degree in which others see the details while stalking your Outlook is completely up to you. Feel free to set everything as ‘Private’. 🙂

Oh, and when you do receive those inevitable requests for your attention during those commitments. Decline them. You have a prior commitment with someone you don’t spend enough time with.

This isn’t just a challenge between 9am and 5pm. We have spouses, children, friends. There are those in our life we love and enjoy spending time with. There are an infinite number of professional events we could attend every night of the week.

It’s easy for the wants, needs, and aspirations of others to crowd out our own. It’s easy to move heaven and hell for their basketball game, their networking event – but not your yoga class or learning a new song on your guitar. It’s easy to decompress in-front of your spouse’s favorite Netflix exclusive rather than studying to increasing your beer judge ranking.

Yet, resentment and burn-out fester when we don’t serve ourselves the way we serve others. When we don’t commit to our own happiness the way we commit to others’.
Every day there is time to put the things most fulfilling to you – selfishly fulfilling to you – on your calendar. Explicitly and obviously scheduled on your calendar. Something to anticipate, something to refuel you, something to pull you through all those meetings with others.

The Bi-Weekly Preview isn’t restricted to the work day. It’s for your entire day. It’s for all of you.

A few years back, when the weather wasn’t conducive for playing kubb outside, I started a mindful meditation practice. It quickly provided me much the same mind calming benefit indoors as kubb does outdoors.

After steadily building a daily practice for about a year, my schedule shifted, my priorities shifted. Today my practice is much less frequent.

In fact, my practice is currently a bi-weekly guided meditation class at my neighborhood gym. Though I can (and have) successfully maintained my practice solo – having an appointment involving other people at a specific time suddenly makes it An Important Meeting.

There’s the added benefit of a yogi focused on keeping it fresh through a new technique or suggestion. I always leave refreshed, more centered, and more proactive.

It’s easy to allow each day to bleed into the next. Easy to commute into work on Monday and commute home on Friday without knowing quite sure what happened in-between. You probably replied to some emails and sat in some meetings.

But what did you accomplish?

It’s not that you or anyone else is disappointed in your work. You’re actually moving things forward quite nicely.

It’s just…

It’s just that it you feel like you’re only reacting, just putting out fires, never moving the big, important work forward. Never quite being able to work on the most exciting projects, or solving the most irritating problems. Always feeling behind – not to mention running late. Or, not quite sure where to best apply your energy.

In working with the most ambitious, creative, and driven professionals, I’ve found they continually struggle with two things;
– blocking off time for planning their work (and keeping that commitment to themselves) and

– ensuring all their most important commitments have an appropriate place on their calendar within the next two weeks.

If there was one key technique, one key habit providing the benefits of the How To Use a Calendar program in concentrated form it would be The Guided Bi-Weekly Preview.

Clients have asked me what they need to get the most out of The Guided Bi-Weekly Preview. Perhaps counter-intuitively, you need two things:

– Some sense of all your current commitments, their milestones and deadlines.

– At least one trusted list. This list isn’t a ‘To Do’ list or even a ‘Someday Maybe’ list- it’s far too exciting, far too inspiring to include ‘vacuum stairs’. It’s an ‘Won’t It Be Amazing When I’ list. This list is for all the things ‘You’re too busy’ for, all those things the resistance is keeping you from.

A ‘Bucket List’?

Um, sure, if you must be pessimistic about it. I prefer “Before 2020” for that begins to answer When?. The 3-5 year time frame is long enough to dream outside of your daily banality, yet short enough to be see the end. Whether or not it’s a Bucket List really depends on where you’re at in 2020 🙂

I don’t care if it’s currently empty. I care that it’s where you go when you’ve have an idea for something fitting that description. I care that during your Weekly Preview you ask, “What’s one small step I can take next week?”

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For an extremely limited time, just Fri Sep 16th in fact, I’m offering four 1-on-1 sessions of my Guided Bi-Weekly Preview for just $250.