How prioritisation has guided my personal approach to mental wellbeing
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all” Peter Druker
Prioritisation is one of those processes that is simple to understand but difficult to action. At its heart, prioritisation involves understanding the work you have to do and choosing to focus on the tasks that get you to your objective most effectively. It sounds simple enough.
But in my personal experience, with three teenage children and a role at a fast-growing company like Xero, there is no shortage of tasks, activities and conversations to prioritise. If I’m not careful my day can become dominated by what is right in front of me: emails and meetings.
It’s something that I have to keep my eye on constantly. I plan time into my day to think through complex problems and seek out opportunities to stand back and see the big picture. If I don’t focus on it, then it is easy to let outside influences take control over how I sequence my work. Without a prioritisation process, we can spend our days keeping busy but not really thinking through whether we’re moving closer or further away from our objectives.
For some of us, this has been especially challenging through COVID-19 because we’re distanced from our teams, our leaders and the rudimentary physical environments that keep us connected, aligned and focused. To compensate for that lack of order, it’s easy to become over-connected and constantly attached to always-on communication channels.
This inherently leads to time and mental energy spent on superfluous tasks, not only increasing our workload but our cognitive load too. The personal effects of this increased load might feel small at the time, but I find that they’re incremental, particularly over a prolonged and undefined period, like we’re experiencing with COVID-19.
The results are starting to show in the latest studies.
Harvey Nash and KPMG’s 2020 CIO survey reported that technology teams are coming under increased pressure to keep their organisations stable and secure, and often this comes at the expense of an individual’s mental wellbeing. The survey found that 84% of technology leaders were concerned with the mental health of their team.
While mental health in technology teams is a growing concern, a silver lining of COVID-19 is that it might now be getting the attention it deserves. Organisations have a responsibility here and it’s encouraging that the survey found that 58% of technology leaders have implemented programs to minimise the load and support the mental wellbeing of their employees.
But there are also daily practices we can implement at an individual level. For me, it’s a very simple process of prioritisation. As a technical person, I am always searching for structured approaches to messy or nuanced situations. So this month, in recognition of World Mental Health Day, I’ve taken time to revisit my prioritisation practices and ensure they’re relevant to our current working situation.
Before I share them with you, I have a disclaimer. There is never going to be a perfect time management or prioritisation system that addresses all of you and your teams’ wants and needs. But these guidelines have been useful for me, and my hope in sharing them is that they’ll help you find your own practice.
Having a clear purpose and objectives
This is an obvious assertion, but it’s an important one. It’s impossible to prioritise your work if you don’t have an objective. I find that I need a long-term goal in order to stay on track with the meaning and direction of my everyday work.
One of my long-term goals is to build Xero into one of the most sustainably excellent software engineering companies in the world — an organisation where engineers take pride in the quality of what they build and how they work. We want to build products that thrive because they are well made and enduring.
But my long-term goals aren’t, and yours shouldn’t be, limited to work related objectives. To ensure you balance the pressures of work with the rest of your life, it’s important to be intentional about your health, your family and how you spend your time.
A set of objectives spanning my work and personal life helps me sort my work into the tasks that matter and those that can wait. It helps me focus my energy and attention on efforts that move us forward and those that are distractions. I’ve also found it important to be really clear on how my personal objectives, or those of my team, connect with the product, technology and company strategy.
Reflecting on work
Second, I build regular time into my calendar to reflect on what I’m working on and how I’m working.
I think it is really important to be kind to yourself during these reflections. Frequently things don’t work as you planned. New priorities emerge and the realities of life impinge on your plans. These reflections are opportunities to review what you have achieved and reset your plans for the next period. They are a chance to look for ways to improve and get better and acknowledge that some things are out of your control.
I use this time to reset and plan the work I must get done in the next week. I often need to update this list during the week, but I use it to hold myself to account and avoid defaulting to prioritisation by email.
If you lead teams responsible for supporting production systems, a great place to start is prioritising work to reduce your team’s toil — the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automated, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows. This might mean prioritising fixing recurring problems or tuning alerting.
A reflective practice also includes continuous development, which can fall off the radar in times of increased load. In times like this, I choose areas of development that move me closer to one of my objectives, or improve my ways of working so that I can be more effective in reaching it.
One area I recently focused on improving is approvals. In my role, I approve a range of things from contracts and new hires, through to access to buildings currently closed due to COVID-19. I noticed that these approvals were becoming a significant distraction. On occasion, these urgent requests were interrupting the focused work that is so important in my role.
To balance this, I developed a new system which means those requests are aggregated into one place so I can process them once a day. This may sound like a minor change, but these small continuous improvements add up to a much more productive and satisfying working experience.
Last but not least, consider how you and your team are feeling. Reflection can be a great way to monitor and refocus your workload, but it’s also a key tool for managing your mental wellbeing and asking for help.
Using a prioritisation framework
We all have a long list of valuable things we could work on — far more than the time available to us — so it’s crucial for our own success, that of our teams, and the companies we work for that we’re ruthless about what we choose to do.
A prioritisation framework provides a structured way of evaluating and comparing all of the work you or your team have to do. There are plenty of great approaches out there, like Cost of Delay, Qualitative Cost of Delay, RICE, and Opportunity Scoring. The key to using these frameworks is to keep it simple. Don’t expect them to produce the perfect result. They are useful because they surface the assumptions of different people in the group and help facilitate a better conversation.
The prioritisation framework that I keep coming back to is Cost of Delay. As well as synthesising impact and cost of a change, it also crucially factors urgency. So rather than just measuring the net upside of a piece of work, it’s also always asking the sceptical question, ‘so what if we don’t do this now?’ It’s always trying to defer work.
Finally, it’s important to note that your chosen prioritisation method is just one input into your decisions. It promotes critical thinking. When creating your own process, seek the perspective of others, including your manager and your peers, who can help you make informed decisions.
The environment we operate in is complex and has more variables than any formula can realistically quantify, so this process requires an open mind and an acceptance of sometimes getting it wrong. While the process might not give you a bullet-proof answer, simply going through it can be a powerful exercise for reducing arbitrary tasks, focusing your attention in the right areas, managing your levels of stress, and taking care of your team’s mental wellbeing.
