You Don’t Need a Clock to Know You’re a Badass

You’re getting things done. You’re a DOer.

How many hours, would you say, you spend being awesome?

Were you hired for your knowledge and your ability to apply that knowledge to judgment? Or were you hired to perform routine work without applying discretion?

Credit: Flickr user Tom Blackwell/ Punch Clock

I don’t go to the craft fair and visit booths of people listing how much time they spent crafting their pieces. When I see something that’s intricate and of high quality, I simply imagine the amount of time it took. What’s great about this is that I’ll always be right — whether I think it took 3 hours or 30, I’ll either agree with its stated price, or not.

Here’s what I think, and you could apply this to just about any project:

If you know the desired outcome, there can’t possibly be a correlation between hours spent and value added. The value is there, or it is not.

Let’s get back to you, and what you were hired to do. Are you a knowledge worker?

Knowledge is power — the most valuable commodity is not a person’s labor, but the knowledge they possess.

Skeptics will challenge: “Time is the only commodity we all have in equal measure.” — But if we all create a different amount of value with the time we are given, why are we tracking it in a uniform way?

Let’s stop doing that.

What would happen if we focused more on the deliverable than on the time? I’m calling for an end to putting a value on thought work that’s measured in hours. It’s just distracting.

“As we seek to maximize our time, we slice and dice it into ever-smaller increments.” — Tony Crabbe

Crabbe, who wrote “Busy: How to thrive in a world of too much”, says that more awareness on time actually hinders effectiveness. When tracking time, people are found to:

• decide based on immediate demand, failing to consider big picture; and
• prioritize what’s urgent over what’s strategic.

Those decision trends are useful for an assembly line. While performing repetitive tasks, there is no room for considering the big picture or looking for context. You might lose a thumb, in fact, if you started to think about those things while on the line!

Inbox zero also receives Crabbe’s sidelong glance. Trying to clear your inbox, and setting that as a goal, seems like about the most futile thing one could do:

“No business or life was changed by an empty inbox and anyone who gets to zero tasks simply lacks imagination!”- Tony Crabbe

Knowledge workers should not be billing by the hour. Too much of the untrackable goes into producing an awesome end result. Things that are trackable, like inbox zero, don’t prove that good work is being produced.

“Get things done” means things — not time.

Times have changed. Our understanding of structure and flow has changed.

“I still catch myself looking at the clock, calculating how much time I should be working rather than focusing on what I’m getting done in that time.” — Mikael Cho

Cho, the founder of Crew.co, has blogged about all sorts of topics: starting a company, workplace productivity, fundraising, wellness, design, marketing… And I think he’s got some strong opinions.

So indulge me in a bit of confirmation bias as I use his post about work hours to further my point. The things his team at Crew does to maximize time with the goal of results include:

• Setting work hours by energy levels and creating work cycles.
• Taking a (real!) day off.
• Measuring tasks, not hours.

Credit: Flickr user Chris Combe/ Time Out

If metrics accounted for results, rather than hours, we can then be on our way to getting rid of these timers, and tracking intended outcomes instead.

“The important thing to remember is it’s not about the amount of hours you work, but what you do in those hours that counts.” — Mikael Cho

Capture and clarify instead of counting.

You can roll up all of the productivity advice from all of the masters, and I just don’t see time tracking as a functional part of a fruitful process.

Certainly, if you intend to only perform a task for the next 30 minutes, set that timer! My challenge is in the tracking of that time as if the rollup of hours is anything but distracting.

I really think that our challenge with “busyness” is tied up somehow in tracking hours. Tracking how long you spent on unproductive tasks shouldn’t be the thing that makes you realize you need to eliminate unproductive tasks. Celebrating a feature release that made all of your customers’ lives infinitely happier shouldn’t be reduced to an accounting of hours it took to build.

Let’s make progress. Let’s be productive. Let’s track results.