Envy the Paper Boy

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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By David Aronchick

Envy the paper boy. When the papers are delivered in the morning, he knows exactly how much work has ahead of him. He knows how long it takes to fold and put a rubber band/plastic bag around each and stuff it in a bag. He knows how much the bag weighs, and where along the journey it’ll be hardest to carry. At the end of their route, he knows when he’s done. And when he walks away from his route, he’s done for the day, he doesn’t have to think about anything work related until the next morning, giving him complete freedom for the day. What white collar worker can say this? We’re all tethered to our Blackberries/iPhones/G1s, answering mails, being randomized to the nth degree and working against arbitrary and deadlines every hour of every day – and, more often than not, getting nothing really done. Yes, envy the paperboy.

  

When I was at MS, I knew a very senior individual who had a simple philosophy – accomplish three things every day. Three simple things, no more. Three things, you ask? That seems ridiculously low – shouldn’t they be driving through everything under the sun? Ah, grasshopper, you have fallen into the classic trap.

 
Scott Porad has a wonderful post on this very thing, and while his is related to development, it’s appropriate for your entire business. To summarize, if you try to attack 5 things that each take a day in total to complete, at the end of a day, you have 1/5th progress against 5 things, and nothing done. If you spent that whole day on ONE thing, you’d have one thing done – hello sense of accomplishment! And beyond that, should things change direction on day three, rather than having 2/5th of 5 things done, you have two things actually accomplished – and can move on to the next set of work cleanly.
 
 
Yes, there have been about a hojillian books , blogs , time saving tools all about how to manage your time, be efficient, reduce your time spent and generally spend 15 minutes working, make a billion dollars and spend the rest of your time drinking martinis and tanning when the rest of the suckers are out working like dogs. Sounds great right? But we’re Seattle 2.0 – it’s all about startups here, if I’m working 24 hours a day on a million different things, shouldn’t my company be along for the ride?
 
 

Slow down. As many studies have shown, multitasking is a ginormous fail on an individual level. The cost to task switch is far greater than we imagine, and, as a result, you spend so much time ramping down, switching, and then ramping up that you would have been far more efficient to just stick with the original, power through, and move on. The problem comes with the size of the tasks – no one does the work to chunk. That’s where the paper boy comes in.

In a single year, assuming no vacations and a 50 house route, he’s got to deliver 18,250 papers. HOLY COW, that’s a lot of dead trees. But fortunately for him, he has simplicity forced upon him – no matter how hard he works on a single day, he knows he can’t deliver more than 50 papers, so don’t try. Focus, get the 50 houses done quickly and it’s off to the arcade to play DDR. This is the philosophy you need at your business.
 
 

Figure out, in a given day what the top 5 things you want to accomplish that will take a day to do, and pick them off. It doesn’t matter what discipline (sales, marketing, development) – nearly everything can be chunked broken up into pieces of eight hours of solid work (I’m a huge fan of Joel Spolsky’s assumption that anything measured in days is not a real estimate ). If there are separate teams, or multiple people, who truly don’t overlap, feel free to have each group come up with a single set of tasks. Agile/Scrum guys call this the “ backlog ”, and I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t use this term generally. However, I think it needs to be a lot more lightweight – you’re not doing estimation, and every task’s only requirement is that it’s less than 8 hours of work. Congrats, you have your paper route. By the end of the day, if there’s a newspaper on every doorstep you’re done. That doesn’t prevent you from doing more, but it focuses the team to the nth degree.

The beauty of this is many-fold:
  • You know when you’re done with every task
  • You get a sense of accomplishment every day
  • Anything that’s not on the list can be rejected (with authority)

It’s not hard, but it’s certainly counter-intuitive – so it’s rarely done. And it requires discipline – you’re desire to take on just one more thing will kill you. But focus on the paper boy and you’ll be sipping Mai Tais in no time.  

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