2/3rds of work shouldn't be work

I’m not talking about the whole 8-hour thing. Nor am I suggesting you just slack off for most of the day. Instead, I’m suggesting there are valuable and productive things to do that aren’t the tasks you’re expected to complete.

Specifically, in frontline roles, divide your time into:

• 1/3rd getting work done
• 1/3rd making yourself better
• 1/3rd making your team better

Getting work done

Spend a third of your time delivering the things you’re responsible for. If you’re a software engineer, build the features and fix the bugs. If you manage ad spending, update the allocations and create new campaigns. Whatever your “day job” is, do the things for which others depend on you.

Making yourself better

Spend the next third of your time making yourself better. This could be anything from making yourself better at doing your job (e.g., automating repetitive tasks), to totally unrelated self-improvement (e.g., freelancing for another team that does work you’re interested in). The only requirement is that you are dedicating a third of your time to growing your self, in the ways that you want to grow (not the ways your managers want you to grow).

Making your team better

Spend your last third on building up your team. This could be one-on-one apprenticeship (e.g., through pairing on a software problem), or re-inventing processes that impact the whole team (e.g., your work intake and triage process). Similar to above, the requirement is that you spend time making life for your teammates better.

In the grandest sense, you could bend this to include any initiative that “improves the bottom line” if you’re in a for-profit company. However, the reality is that, as an individual contributor, delivering your day-job is probably the best way to contribute to the bottom-line.

In practice

Consider a couple a hypothetical colleague, Frank the Financial Analyst:

Frank rotates through all three of the thirds every day:

• Getting work done: He spends time building weekly and monthly reports that are part of his core role on the finance team.
• Making himself better: Frank experiments with Python and Jupyter, tools that are new to him, to see if they might help him work more quickly.
• Making his team better: A new hire just joined the team, and Frank spends time onboarding his new colleague.

You have questions

This just looks like a normal week at work. What’s the big deal?

That’s awesome! If this doesn’t seem extreme, then I would guess you’re already on a high-functioning team, or at least have a terrific team leader. I challenge you to really push the time split to the limits. Are you really spending 1/3rd of your time focus on yourself? Do you really spend 1/3rd of your time building up your team? Not just tinkering, really investing. If so, keep it up. You rock!

I have way too much work to do. How can I get everything done in only 1/3rd of my time?

You don’t. Not the way you’re doing it now. The other two thirds aren’t disconnected from your day-to-day productivity. Learning new things, trying out new roles, and investing in yourself will make you faster. Upgrading your team’s tooling and processes cuts out waste and will make you faster. If, a year from now, you’re just as fast at doing the same work at the same level of quality, are you still going to be happy in your role?

There’s no way my boss will go for this. They expect me to be on-task essentially 100% of the time.

Even a half-way-decent manager focuses on output, not time. Any other manager isn’t worth your time. Start by squeezing in a few minutes on something off-task that makes you better at your job. Suddenly you’ll be faster, or, even better, you’ll have automated part of your role. Your output is unchanged, and now you have more time to invest in yourself and your team. It snowballs. Your boss just thinks of you as their most reliable team member.

So what?

Don’t forget about yourself and your team at work. Just getting your work done gets you through the week or the month, but won’t take you to a new role. It won’t keep you happy in your current role. Invest as much time in yourself as you invest in your work. An equal share also goes to building up your team.