Transcript

Note: This is an automatically-generated transcript. As a result, there will be imperfections and discrepancies in the text below.

[0:00] For engineers who think their careers should be a blast. This is the engineering and leadership podcast.

[0:07] Music.

[0:08] Okay, Pat Sweet here and welcome to Episode 15 of the engineering and leadership podcast, the show dedicated to helping engineers thrive.
Today I give a sneak peek into my upcoming engineering productivity course by giving away one of the most important skills.
Learning how to prioritize.

[0:33] Music.

[0:39] Everyone. Pat Sweet reporting to you from Canada’s ocean playground. That, of course, is Nova Scotia, Canada.
In good news, as I may have mentioned last week, Hurricane Teddy was coming and did come and went through, but wasn’t nearly as terrible as predicted. So that’s that’s the good news in the bad news.
My Halifax wanders football club lost in the championship match, and I’m still not totally over that. But that’s okay.
We will press on. There will be another season, and today I’m able to turn my attention to my other passion, which, of course, is this podcast. So today is gonna be a lot of fun.
As you already know, I’ve got a course that is out. It’s available for enrollment, or right now, as you’re listening to this and what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna pull the curtains back a little bit and I’m going to give away Ah, little portion of it here on the podcast.
Many people, when I reached out to ask engineers what they,
really wanted to know about what they were really struggling with with respect to engineering productivity, said prioritization that that prioritization and figuring out what to put first on a mile long to do list was the number one issue.
So today I’m going to give five tips right from the course on how you can prioritize your work. So let’s dig right in.

[1:55] Music.

[2:05] As I mentioned, I’ve got a course that I’ve just launched its available for enrollment right now.
You could enroll until 11:59 p.m. On September 30th at being 2020 if you happen to be listening to this fire into the future.
But there are only a few spots, and as of this recording, there are only 33 spots remaining, so you’ve got to get in relatively quickly in order to secure your spot.
The course walks through my own personal productivity system, using a framework that I call the productivity pyramid, and the short version of the framework is this.
Productivity is a combination of three elements. The three sides of the pyramid.
One is effectiveness, the other is efficiency and the last is systems.
Most people equate efficiency with productivity.
Basically, they think that productivity is all about doing things quickly. Doing things with his little importer energy is possible.
But that’s Onley, part of the story.
Effectiveness, which is one of the other side, is about doing the right work in the first place.
So where efficiency is doing that work quickly, effectiveness is doing the right work in the first place,
and systems is all about the the habits and routines and the processes that you set up to ensure that you’re both effective and efficient in a repeatable, consistent way.

[3:25] The course is all about using this framework, explaining the framework,
to help you go from feeling frazzled and frustrated to being in total control of your work, being calm to enjoying your work and always feeling like you’re doing what’s right and doing it well.
And it’s a bit like a personal operating system for engineers, and I’m really excited about it. And I’m really excited to share.
Ah, bit of that course today, if you wanna learn Mawr, if you want to sign up very easy, just go to engineering and leadership dot com slash productivity course.

[3:59] So let’s turn our attention to effectiveness, doing the right work.
Like I mentioned off the top when I ask engineers what they wanted in this course, the most common answer was prioritization.
In other words, they wanted to know about choosing the right work to do.
And like I said, that’s the crux of effectiveness is working on the right things today. Here in the podcast, I’m gonna have five different tips on what you can do to better prioritize to make sure you’re being effective.
And like I said, these were all taken directly from the course material but presented a little bit differently here, obviously, because we’re on a podcast. But like I said from the course, So hopefully this will give you something of an inkling as to what the course is gonna be about. So here we go.
Tip number one is to get very clear on your goals.

[4:45] This might seem a bit funny, but this is the first and most important thing with respect to prioritization.
And if you only do one thing, this would be it is. Get clear on your goals.
You need clear written concrete goals both for yourself. And if you’re a manager for your team, is well because if you don’t have goals, you have no idea what things on your to do list are going to bring you closer to those goals.
And if we agree that effectiveness is all about doing the right work, presumably the right work ought to be those things that help you achieve your goals. Those things that you have decided are important for you and for your organization.
If you don’t have those goals, you don’t know what it’s going to take to get there, and you have no idea what to prioritize.
Many people have a to do list and they’ve got a sense for vaguely what’s important.
But without being able to cross reference the things on your list to a specific set of goals, you’re never going to be able to really and truly determine what is important and this is one of the key takeaways that I want.
I want people to walk away with from this podcast from the course of the whole is that you should always prioritize tasks that move you closer to your goals.
So tip number one. Get crystal clear on your goals and make sure you have those handy.
You either need to be able to remember what your goals are, or have a list of your goals handy for when you’re looking through your to do list so that you can effectively prioritize.

[6:13] Tip Number two is not to get distracted by urgency, and this is very important.
Urgency is not the same as important. Urgency is a measure of how quickly something needs to be done if you’re going to do it at all. So as an example, if you’ve got a flight you need to catch, remember when we used to fly?
We used to go places. What a crazy thought that ISS anyway.
If if you’ve got ah flight that you need to catch, you need to get to the airport on time. That is an urgent task, and if you don’t make it there on time, there’s there’s no reason to go to the airport at all. You’ve missed your flight.
It’s game over, right? So so getting to the airport would be an urgent task.
Now. It may also be important, right? Obviously, if you’re flying somewhere, there’s probably a reason for you to do it.
But that’s a good example of of an urgent task now.
What’s important to bear in mind, though, is not all urgent.
Tasks are important and ah, lot of things get kind of inflated because you know you’ll have a manager come to you or a client come to you and say, I need this done. I need this done now.
And if you stop and think about what bad outcomes might arise if you decided not to do that task and the deadline closes.

[7:28] Um, often often there’s no there’s no particular negative impact other than maybe maybe someone is irked a little bit.
But the problem is, we often prioritize those things that are urgent, because it’s easier to tell which things are urgent versus important.
Like I said, off the top, If you don’t have your goals clear and handy, you don’t know what those are off the top of your head.
It could be difficult toe. Understand which things in your to do list support your goals.
It’s very easy, by contrast, to figure out which deadline is looming. First, people are often very excitable about tasks. Who’s deadlines air coming, whether or not they’re actually important to do so.
Tip number two Don’t get distracted by urgency, and this is much easier to do when you are clear on your goals and you understand what is actually important.

[8:23] Tip number three is to separate regular recurring work from your task list.
One of the things that I do is for for all of the,
things that I have to do in the run of a week that are routine, and that could be signing off for creating my own time sheets, regular metrics, regular reporting meetings that are recurring, that I know I need to prepare agendas for or capture minutes for,
allow this kind of stuff that no matter what else is going on, I know I have to do. I keep all of that stuff in my calendar.
I block specific times to tackle those things, which allows me to take them off my to do list.
And the reason that that’s important is that keeps my to do list much smaller and much Tidier.
And it makes it easier to tell what things on my to do list need to be prioritized.
It just reduces the burden of actually analyzing what all I have in my plate in order to determine what what should come first by keeping things in my calendar, those things that are recurring, what it means is I never have to worry about missing deadlines.
All I have to do is show up to a meeting I’ve booked with myself, and often you know, for things like time sheets Maybe I only need 15 minutes on Monday morning to sign off on my staff’s time sheets.
That’s in there. I know it’s going to happen. I know it’s never going to be late, and it keeps things nice and simple.

[9:46] The other thing that you can do is if you’re keeping your recurring tasks in your calendar, you can also block time to tackle those things that are on your to do list.
You might not necessarily know week to week what those things are going to be, but you know you’re going to have some sort of high priority task.
And then you would go to your to do list to find out what’s most important today to to tackle during the time you’ve blocked for,
quote unquote deep work or important work or whatever you wanna call in, that’s Tip Number three is separate.
The recurring kind of routine stuff from your unique and interesting and project driven stuff.
Tip number four is try establishing a single priority each day.

[10:31] Part of what makes prioritization hard is that choosing to promote one thing and make it a priority means you have to demote other things.
If something is going to come at the top of your list, it means nothing else is at the top of your list and the knee jerk reaction to that. The solution that most people apply without really thinking about it is they make several things. Their priorities.
And the problem with that is that if you decide to focus on many things, you’re not really focusing on anything.
There’s a really good book called Essential is, um from Greg McCown.
And he explains, and I’d recommend anyone listening to this podcast read that book.
Essential is, um um, in that book, he explains that the word priority came about in about the 14 hundreds and was used in the singular from the 14 hundreds through to the 20th century.
There was no such thing as priorities. It was internally inconsistent.
Priority was was just that the single thing that mattered above all else.
So you couldn’t have priorities. You have the single priority, and that makes way more sense to me.

[11:46] But today, like I said, everyone feels like they have priorities. And this isn’t necessarily the fault of an individual.
Organizations push priorities on their people and then wonder why it’s so hard for people to get anything done is that their attention is scattered. They’re unable to focus because they’re asked not to buy,
focusing quote unquote on lots of different things.
Now, when I say it’s important to have a single priority, I don’t necessarily believe that most people can arrange an entire day around a single task or project.
I know I can’t. I’ve got client meetings. Like I said, there are a bunch of recurring reports and pop ups.
But there’s always space in each day and there’s always a focus for me for each day meeting whatever time that I have.
After taking care of the responsibilities that I have in the meetings I have and all the rest, any time that I have and I’ll call this kind of discretionary time where I really do get to choose what I’m working on, I have a single priority for the day.
There’s a single thing each day that I commit to making sure happens, and that’s that’s really, really important, right, because then you really do understand in your own mind.

[13:00] Once you’ve decided something is a priority, that it really is your one and only thing.
And if you can actually accomplish that, which it doesn’t sound like it’s that hard to accomplish a single thing each day,
but When you get down to actually planning what you’re going to do, you’ll find it’s really easy for you to get swept up in the hustle and bustle of the day and not actually get down to any of your own work at the end of a busy day.

[13:25] So if you’re not bogged down by a number of meetings and that kind of thing, then awesome, that’s great.
Maybe you can choose to things you want to focus on each day one priority for the morning and a priority for the afternoon and actually push things through to completion.
And if you’re able to do that, you’re really able to commit toe a single priority that you’re probably doing a very good job of actually prioritizing your work.
If you can get down to the one and only you’re doing, you’re doing much, much better than 98% of the rest of humanity.
Finally, the last thing that I wanted to talk about last tip with respect to prioritization is to build task assessment into your schedule.
Often engineers lose sight of their tasks and their priorities because they don’t dedicate time to maintain their task lists.
Your task list is a lot like email. You can’t live in there all day, but you also can’t ignore it and let it fester. Either.
My solution is to make two appointments for myself. One is an appointment I make at the end of each day to cross things off my list and set priorities for my next today.
And the second is something that happens at the end of each week or every other week, where I do a deep dive into my own list.
Do ah task list, scrub and clean things up.

[14:40] I like the end of the day routine because you can review what has happened.
What’s going on while it’s still fresh in your mind, and the other thing you get to do is you. Can you can set your priority for the next day, meaning you already know when you show up in the morning what you’re going to work on.
Even better, you can set out the tools or even open the files so that as soon as you sit down, you can get to work immediately.
It’s it’s hugely gratifying and makes tackling your one priority for the day much, much, much easier for the biweekly or weekly cleanup.
What that allows you to do is to evaluate your whole list and for every task. What I do is I make sure that the importance and urgency are still correct. For each task, I check to see if there’s anything obsolete or not worth doing anymore.
I see if there’s anything that could be delegated or transferred to someone else,
and I set priorities at the project level is, well, I break up my to do list into projects,
and if I can establish that a particular project is high priority, the tasks on that project automatically get elevated to a certain level, and then I can prioritize within that project.

[15:50] But that takes time, and what I like to do is I like Thio block a now ER or to to really do a deep dive into my work and re re baseline things reestablished where things are to make.
It is easiest possible to look at my tasks from a from a 30,000 ft view and really make sure that I’m seeing the forest for the trees in the times when I end up losing sight of my priorities.
It’s probably because I’ve not made time for my weekly or biweekly scrub that it’s almost always at least a contributor there.

[16:21] So those the 55 tips for prioritization I’ll go through them again.
Number one was to get clear on your goals. Evaluate your tasks against those goals.
Tasks that support your goals are important. Number two was. Don’t get distracted by urgency.
Urgency is not the same as importance and not as important as importance. It was a bit of a mouthful, but but I think you catch the drift.

[16:45] Number three separate the recurring from the unique tasks so that they could be managed separately and to give your unique tasks in your task list.
Some room to breathe and make them easier to analyze.
Tip number four was to have a singular priority for each day with a rocker to do lists like it’s Year 14 32 and have a single priority.
And Tip five was to implement daily and weekly scrubs of your to do list so that everything’s fresh.
Your most important task is always clear and that you’re picking up the weeds, so to speak, every so often to make sure that you understand what your to do list really looks like.
Hopefully that’s a help to anyone who is struggling to make sense of their ballooning to do lists.
Listen, if you’re feeling stressed, you’re feeling overwhelmed at work.
I definitely suggest you check out this course that I’ve been talking about.
I go through a ton of strategies just like these and much, much more, including things like using an Eisenhower matrix, how to say no to tasks that don’t contribute to your goals and many, many other things again,
if you’d like to learn more, all you have to do is go to engineering and leadership dot com slash productivity course.
And remember the deadline for registration is 11:59 p.m.
Eastern on September 30th, and as of this recording, there are only 33 seats remaining.
So do check that out again. Engineering and leadership dot com slash productivity course.

[18:08] Next up, we’ve got the engineering and leadership mailbag.

[18:11] Music.

[18:22] This, of course, is the part of the show where I read your mail, your comments, tweets and messages and answer your questions.
I promise to read absolutely everything you send me and share my very favorites here in the podcast.
I just wanted to offer a special thanks to John, who is the very first person to sign up for this productivity’s course you wrote on linked in to Say how excited it was.
And you have no idea how excited I am. John, this is really, really cool that you’re joining me and, uh, and several others at this point, So this is gonna be a lot of fun. So thanks very, very much.
And I also wanted to give a shout out to Nater Malai of Engineer Your Mission at Engineer your mission dot com, who’s been super active on LinkedIn lately and commenting on a bunch of my stuff and sharing a bunch of stuff which is,
just awesome neighbors a great guy.
So if you need help looking for your next job as an engineer Natives website is definitely something to check out again. That’s engineer your mission dot com.
Also, if you use the Lincoln App on your phone.
There’s a new stories feature that nature has been taking full advantage of really, really good videos. Some funny stuff, too.
So definitely check that out again. That’s nater, Molly, from engineer your mission.
And again a quick reminder that if you’d like to be on the show, you can do that.
All you have to do is leave me a voicemail at engineering and leadership dot com slash contact.
I’d love to know what you think. I’d love to get your voice on the show, so do reach out again. Engineering leadership dot com slash contact.

[19:50] Music.

[19:53] Mhm.

[19:55] That is all the time we have for this show today. My friends don’t forget one last time to check out that productivity course.
I’d love to have you along. We’re gonna have a lot of fun and learn a lot and grow a lot.
It’s gonna be an absolute blast If you enjoy the show.
Don’t forget to subscribe, and please leave an honest review. That helps me a lot to make the show better.
If you want to read what you just heard, go to engineering and leadership dot com slash episode 15 for the transcript and all the links and resources mentioned until next time.
This is Pat Sweet, reminding you that if you’re going to be anything, be excellent.
E

[20:30] Music.

[20:34] Thank you.

[20:37] Thank you. You’ve been listening to the engineering and leadership podcast with Pat Sweet.
If you’d like to learn more, go to engineering and leadership dot com, where you’ll find Mawr free articles, podcasts and downloads to help engineers thrive.
That’s engineering and leadership dot com.

[20:56] Music.