I’ve had a couple of conversations recently about the joys of time sheets — and why tracking an individuals work is usually a terrible idea (as well being a PITA.)
This is not a post about that pain, but the conversations reminded me of a trick I’ve found useful when forced to track time.
The trick is simple: Block out the time for the primary task — then log and subtract the time spent on the things interrupting that task.
The nice things this approach gives me:
I end up with a list of interruptions — along with what they interrupted. Looking back at that each week, sometimes with co-workers, was a super useful starting point for conversations about focus, the cost of context switching, etc. It became the fuel for many a productive conversation in retrospectives.
It made me, and the interrupter, much more conscious of things that took me away from my main task. Which sometimes helped both of us realise that it wasn’t the smartest thing to be doing at this particular moment.
I had to spend less time faffing with time tracking — since most of my time was spent on the primary task.
(I’ve yet to see a tool support this kind of time tracking model explicitly — if you find one do let me know.)
I’ve found tracking interruptions useful even when nobody is being forcing to track time.
Even (maybe especially!) at the senior leadership level.
For example — I worked with a VP of Product who was having a problems with her strategy work. Once we started tracking interruptions we could see how she was getting dragged into a whole bunch of lower-level tactical discussions by the rest of the product org (who had maybe got a little bit too used to her solving their problems ;-)
Once everybody could see the underlying problem it was much easier to see solutions like delegating more, training up some folk, encouraging more peer work amongst the product folk, etc.
When somebody cannot find focused time — or when something isn’t progressing as we expect — surfacing and tracking interruptions often reveals interesting things.
It’s useful at the team level too.
For example — back in the good old days where we had a physical kanban board — we managed to train a co-founder to stop interrupting the team with random tasks by walking them to the board and discussing whether it was more important than the current story being worked on.
Visualising the impact of interruptions as explicitly as possible helps everybody to have a sensible conversation about impact, priorities & value.
TL;DR: If you’re forced to track your time, try tracking interruptions instead.
ttfn.