I studied the growth of Amazon and Intel: Here’s 5 tips on how to work less and get more done
Do these following remarks sound familiar to you?
“How I wish I have 48 hours in a day!”
“Time passes so quickly that at the end of the day I don’t know what I have done.”
“Even with so many people helping me, I am still very busy.”
How can people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs achieve so many things in a day even when they have the same amount of time as we do?
I pride myself as a very efficient person — I used to be on a 70-hour workweek to help drive the growth of the company. But after a few years of hustling and getting burnt out, the company is still charting an average SME growth instead of the hockey stick growth, so I realised something must not be going right.
Thanks to the pandemic, I’ve had time to read, think and reflect on the things we do. So I dug into a few insightful reads like John Rossman’s ‘Think Like Amazon’, Clayton Christensen’s ‘How will you measure your life?’ and Andy Grove’s ‘High Output Management’. The learnings are groundbreaking and I definitely wish I had read these years before I started the company.
I’ve started implementing some of the theories I learnt to my work at TripCanvas, and it shows some promising development — with improved team communications, sustainable growth and improved morale. I’m still on a learning journey and if you have stories to share about your journey too, please comment — I would love to hear from you.measu
1. The matrix of effort vs impact — How do you prioritise?
The number 1 thing that highly effective people do is that they watch very carefully what they spend their time on, instead of diving right away into execution mode.
Using the Impact Effort Matrix, there are 4 ways you can spend your time:
a. Quick wins (Low effort high impact)
This is low-hanging fruit and it’s a no brainer that most people should execute this right away. This type of tasks is usually uncommon.
b. Minion’s job (Low effort low impact)
The problem starts when we are done with these, we start clearing notifications, emails, and organising files. Do you know why?
It’s highly addictive.
There’s a reason why it’s satisfying to see rows of well-organized dishes and hung laundry.
Without knowing, you can easily pour in hours or days of your time only to realize that you are doing “janitor’s work”. Do you want to do a $5-an-hour job or is better to delegate to another person to do this while you focus on planning for a $500-an-hour job?
Of course, sometimes there are just certain things in life that need to be done, like paying the bills or running errands that you can’t avoid. The key is to always assess if this is something urgent. If it’s urgent and you can’t find someone to delegate to, you have no choice to just do it but make a conscious note to avoid this urgent situation next time (it’s an organisational failure to have urgent tasks every day).
If it’s not urgent, always defer it and plan towards having someone to delegate to.
This is the number 1 reason why you might feel so busy but at the end of the day, you can’t tell what you have actually done.
c. Big bets — shoot for the moon (High effort high impact)
Instead of jumping into “Minion’s job” after “Quick wins”, make sure you jump right into this.
These are usually moonshooting projects that, if planned and executed well, will help your business enter unchartered territory, providing the next stage of growth when your current business is stagnant (perhaps due to more competitors hence driving down profits, more regulated markets, more challenges in distinguishing product offerings and more).
For example, one of the largest companies in the world, Amazon, has been facing slow growth rate in their retail e-commerce sales. If they just focused on improving their product offerings and delivery networks, it would have just brought them marginal differences.
It was because of their relentless advancement in uncharted territory that gave birth to high growth products like AWS, Amazon Go, Kindle Fire and more. AWS alone has grown by over 400% in the past 5 years!
Big bets require thinking big and doing something different, and the key characteristic of it is that it takes time to plan and execute before you finally see the fruit of the labour. It’s very easy to defer this because you don’t see immediate results (probably just like your commitment to exercising) — so make sure you persevere even if you don’t see visible results of growth at the start!
And make sure you don’t delegate this!
d. Thankless job (High effort low impact)
This is self-explanatory — nobody wants to spend millions of dollars throwing a party for just one person. Make sure you avoid this thankless job at all cost!
So how do you start prioritizing? The first step is to ensure that the company (from top to bottom and inside out) measure impact instead of effort, set up metrics to define the meaningful output, i.e. the number of successful deliveries, the number of positive reviews, number of readers served etc (as opposed to effort like numbers of articles written, number of products listed etc).
Watch very carefully how you spend your time, and this requires good planning — which leads to my next point.
“The trap that many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.” — Clayton Christensen
2. How do you avoid “traffic jam” in your day/week?
For those of you who drive, you will notice one phenomenon: Just before the rush hour, there would be a number of vehicles on the road and even though there’s a constant addition of vehicles to the road, you can still cruise with minimal disruptions.
However, upon entering the rush hour, when the number of vehicles reaches a tipping point, even a brief stop initiated by a vehicle in front can cause a massive traffic jam.
The same happens to our day too. More often than not, we are way too ambitious in planning our day, forgetting that there will be unforeseen circumstances or more important priorities coming our way that we have to attend to.
If we leave “gaps” in our day, we would have no problems accepting a few additional unforeseen work — just like during the non-rush hour. You will be cruising just fine.
However, if we plan for the entire day of work without leaving any gaps of time for emergencies, even a tiny unplanned assignment entering the workflow will throw things out of balance and cause a major traffic jam. And traffic jams are inefficient, anxiety-inducing and frustrating.
“Only plan for 4–5 hours of real work per day.” — David Heinemeier Hanson, Founder and CTO at Basecamp
So how do you start your day right? Resist jumping right into tasks when you wake up — however seemingly important it is. Nothing is more important than planning your day.
Even better, after caring for yourself (i.e. washing up, exercising, etc) allow yourself to daydream for 30 minutes to 1 hour. This is a powerful strategic procrastination method that can lead to more creative problem-solving. When you do this, your subconscious mind can generate new ground for massive action.
In fact, when Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs was putting things off and going on walks, he was actually creating a vacuum inside of his brain that could be filled with new ideas and potential solutions to the problems he was working on.
Seize the day instead of letting your day seize you.
Pro tip: It’s very common that companies and teams set monthly and weekly plans to align the team. But do not let these dictate your day — in our highly dynamic business landscape, the situation changes every day, and priorities change every day as well.
It’s unrealistic to think that our priorities of the day don’t change once we set our weekly or monthly plans. Make sure to have your own daily plan so that it’s adaptable to achieve the highest impact.
And avoid over-planning, because it doesn’t matter if you plan for the next 2–3 months — if the situation changes, none of what you have planned would be realised anyway, so you would have wasted time on planning.
3. Hustle culture — Work hard or work smart?
“Rich people don’t sleep 8 hours a day. That’s a third of your life!” said American TV presenter Steve Harvey during his morning talk show The Steve Harvey Show in 2019.
During my startup years, hustle culture was all the rage.
Hard work was (and is still) glorified. Elon Musk sleeps 6 hours a day on average and sometimes he even bunks in on his Tesla factory floor to save time. This rigorous work routine has resulted in his multibillion-dollar empire. This hustling culture is also popularized by well-known American entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk and Mark Cuban.
On the other hand, there’s also another point of view shared by the guru of ‘Disruptive Innovation’ Clayton Christensen, favouring life over work. This school of thought looks at motivation at work from a more holistic point of view.
And it’s about working smart, not just working hard.
So which school of thought is better?
Lately, I stumbled upon this video from Andrew Kirby and I agree with his view on hustle culture:
Quoting Andrew Kirby, it’s not about being busy, but it’s about being productive — or in other words, generating impact.
The curve of productivity plotted against time looks like this:
In the beginning, when you work more, you will often feel that every ounce of energy you put in creates more output. But you will reach a saturation point when despite the more hours you put in, your productivity actually reduces. Furthermore, the more you work, the more you’ll feel frustrated that the results aren’t satisfactory and eventually it leads to burnout.
From my experience, it’s better to just stop working when you feel your productivity is going down — take a break, go for a walk and refresh your mind.
Don’t feel guilty about it, your body and productivity will thank you later.
“It’s normal to have days where you just can’t work and days where you’ll work 12 hours straight.” Work more when you are in the working zone. Relax when you’re not. — Alain Paquin, Whatsnexx
The 80/20 Rule of Time Management — approximately 20 percent of your effort produces 80 percent of the results.
4. Leveraging on other people’s work
This term — other people’s work (OPW) — was coined by Amazon’s management principle.
Quoting John Rossman in ‘Think Like Amazon’, “For work that is repeatable and poised to grow significantly or experience dramatic spikes, enable and motivate other people to do it for you.”
This is evident in Amazon’s flywheel chart:
You can see a lot of OPW is at work. Instead of painstakingly growing the supplies and acquiring customers themselves, Amazon focuses on developing logistical solutions, seller tools and more, so that they can empower sellers to produce lower-cost products and more product selections.
In turn, this encourages more customers to return for repeat purchases, thus generating a flywheel that can grow by itself.
The concept of OPW works for delegation too — when you feel that others can do at least 70–80% as well as you do, delegate and train them to do it. This will double your output if done well. And here’s how this entrepreneur grew his agency by 50% by firing himself from the top designer position.
Pro tip: For both scenarios, the key is to spend time aligning team members’ interests with yours.
What do I mean by that? Define your goal (i.e. What’s your promise to your customers?), list down all the desirable outcomes, set up the metrics to measure them and hold those in charge accountable for those metrics.
However, sometimes due to the pressure of achieving a certain desirable outcome, it might be tempting to micromanage and define all the “how to do”s.
Don’t.
This is very time-consuming, damages employees’ confidence and incapacitates their ability to judge what’s the right thing to do.
Allow failures to occur — that’s the best way for people to learn.
Try to avoid escalating or asking for permission to “do the right thing” — John Rossman, Amazon
5. The Marshmallow test — Instant vs delayed gratification
Stanford University once ran a famous experiment in the 1970s, where a child was placed in a room and presented with a marshmallow on a plate. He was then told, “You can either eat this one marshmallow now… or, if you wait for 15 minutes, you can have two marshmallows instead.”
This experiment is widely known for its study on the effect of instant and delayed gratification.
If you plot the happiness over a foreseeable timeframe for instant vs delayed gratification, you will see something like this:
The Marshmallow moment is real. We face instances of instant gratification every day — think about the dopamine dose you get when you open your social media, the moment you receive likes for your latest posts on Instagram, or the burst of happiness when you eat a scoop of ice-cream.
However, this burst of happiness only lasts for a moment, and shortly after you will be craving for it again — for which the lack of it sometimes creates a sense of emptiness.
On the other hand, delayed gratification often challenges your willpower. Think about the run that you’ve always procrastinated (which will keep you in shape for years to come), the challenges of finishing a book without distractions, or even starting a new business venture.
All these often provide short-term pain (and reduced happiness) and are void of short-term dopamine boost, but often provide long-term benefits in years to come.
Should I invest in a new business venture or cash out for immediate needs? Should I put off my current operational responsibilities and focus on building a good system for the team?
Which one will you choose?
There’s no straightforward answer to this, but I find that Jeff Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework provides great insight on how to navigate daily decisions like these.
Basically, it goes along the lines of projecting yourself forward to age 80 and say, “OK, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.”
This led him to take a leap of faith to leave his high-paying Wall Street job and start Amazon, growing it to the e-commerce giant we see today.
This framework allows you to focus on the long term, and remove short-term noise that can impair your judgement.
Even equipped with the above learnings, trying to make every second count is still incredibly difficult.
It’s estimated that the average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day. It’s an art to perfect the skills of prioritization, planning your day, delegating to the team and balancing instant vs delayed gratification.
But being able to do this well is what can set you apart from others.
Above all, don’t forget to take breaks sometimes. Cheers!
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