#0133: Let's talk about 4/3 time
Braingasm
The topic of “20% time” gets much press as a tool that organisations can use to foster internal innovation. Famously, products like GMail and Adsense came about because Google allowed its staff to spend 20% of their time working on whatever tickled their fancy. Interestingly, since about 2015 Google repurposed the initiative to allow for “more focussed innovation” which is probably coded corporate-speak for something along the lines of “we kinda lost control of this initiative”. Even so, it gave the outward impression of being successful while it lasted.
“Magic time” is another phrase in the same vein. In this case, the term refers to folks working in an organisation to “magically” find time to work on internal side projects over and above the time they would otherwise be obliged to spend on product development servicing customers, or consulting.
However, this post is about neither of these things. It’s about what I call “4/3 time” and how it applies to leadership. The idea behind 4/3 time is that in most, if not all places, you have to divide your time up into (approximately) three chunks:
- Doing the main thing that your business is in business to do (ie profitably creating, innovating, and delivering, products and services to your customers)
- Doing the things that set the business up to be better in the future than it is today (ie analysing strategic contexts, making strategic decisions, and taking strategic actions)
- Doing the things that allow your people to be their best today and grow to be better tomorrow (ie setting up people to be their best)
In practice, #3 almost always comes first, at least from the perspective of leadership because it’s the people in the organisation that end up doing both #1 and #2, and without good people set up well to be their best, then not much else is possible.
There is a good discussion to be had into the ratio that you might apply to each category. There is no doubt that the ratio changes both with level. For example, there is more focus on people and strategy the higher up the organisation you go, and junior software engineers in a SaaS business would focus on product/service development. For the sake of argument, let’s say that it is roughly a third to each.
However, it is only after you’ve divided up your time into these three chunks that you realise that you have four and not three things to do. The “fourth third” something you have to do is lead. This “extra” activity can catch you by surprise, especially when you’re a newly minted leader because it’s not apparent what “leadership” even means, let alone what is required to be good at it.
However, this post’s purpose is not to answer “What is good leadership?” As a leader, it is essential for you to be intentional about your leadership style, to come up with personally targetted frameworks and heuristics to make it work for you and your teams and to iterate and refine them so that they stay current.
The purpose of the post is much simpler. It is merely to suggest that as a Leader you need to perform a bit of magic on yourself so you can find that “fourth third” block of time necessary to dedicate to the craft of leadership, as opposed to the art. This ability to perform this little bit of magic falls into the category of what I call “art versus craft moves”. [ED: See “Art versus craft” for more details]
I genuinely believe that the same is true of good leadership. Finding a way to create the space for that fourth third of your time is one of the craft moves that you need to get right to be effective over the long term.
Footnote: I anticipate some push back on the concept of 4/3 time from folks who (for good reasons!) decry less-well run organisations who create unsustainable work environments that lead inevitably to burnout. The point about 4/3 time is not that you need to work 1/3 extra to be good at your job, but rather that the trick is in recognising that leadership is a thing in and of itself that requires specific attention, and that it is worth doing and worth doing well.
Once you recognise that, prioritising accordingly becomes a whole lot easier.
Regards,
M@
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