Anyone else having that “end of the week I didn’t get everything done” panic? Do you often find yourself staring at your wall-to-wall meeting calendar while crying internally (or externally, no judgment)? Well then boy do I have the perfect podcast for you this week. Block your calendars, because today we’re talking to Kelly Vaughn, the Director of Engineering at Spot AI.
There's no one-size-fits-all approach to mastering time management and delegating tasks, but I can put some tools in your pocket to help with success. At the core of most of these issues is allowing yourself the autonomy to prioritize and just say no to things. That’s right kids, just say no. Fun fact: D.A.R.E. actually stands for Delegation And Respect (your time) Education. But in all seriousness, your time is YOUR time. Do with it whatever you think is correct— even if that means you don’t get the whole to-do list done or you have to ask your team for help.
If I’ve piqued your interest enough to tune in to the full podcast:
If you only have a couple of minutes to spare:
Okay, picture this. It’s a regular Monday morning for you. What do you do— you grab a cup of coffee, sit down, look at your calendar for the week and make a to-do list. Even as you’re writing your to-do’s you’re probably already thinking, “Man, there’s no way I’m actually going to get to all these things… where am I going to drop the ball this week.” What a negative thought process to start the week, right? If Ciara is pushing the “1,2 Step”, Kelly suggested adopting the “1-2-3 Step”
(1) Pick one thing that must get done this week. If you complete this task, you’ll have a successful week
(2) Pick two things to back up the first thing. You don’t have to finish these tasks, but just in case to tackle “one” you’ve given yourself guidance for the next steps.
(3) Pick three little tasks that you never give yourself time to do. You can’t work on big tasks 8 hours a day 5 days a week. These little tasks like cleaning up your email are not only easily cross off-able but they give your brain a break.
So if this is how you schedule your week, how do you schedule your day? Honestly, I can’t recommend enough knocking out your most intensive tasks at the beginning of the day. Your brain will be in a space to do your deepest thinking, and you’ll (fingers crossed) have the least likelihood for interruption. Plus nothing feels as good as the task you’ve been dreading being done, right? If you have a day scheduled with just the same task back-to-back all day (like one on one meetings), try peppering them throughout the week instead. That lingering burnout feeling might dissolve just a little.
Beyond that, just listen to what your brain and your body are telling you. If you’re mentally done, don’t push it. Cancel that late afternoon meeting and step away. I can guarantee work will still be there tomorrow. Unless you do this for weeks on end… work actually may not still be there for you tomorrow.
Kelly is out here getting increasingly book smart (and I’m just surrounding myself with these people so I get the Cliff Notes version), and referenced a book she’s reading called Measure What Matters by John Doerr. So if you’re into goal-setting and OKRs, I expect a full report on my desk by Monday morning. Kelly and I talked briefly about tradeoffs and how they’re unavoidable in the workplace. If you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. Where this comes into play (and in a practice you can put into place literally right now) is communicating that with your coworkers/managers/whoever else is expecting work from you. If there’s a task you absolutely know that you’re not going to get to this week, just tell them. Surprises are for giving gifts, expectations are for the workplace. So when you’re structuring your week next week think, “what am I going to get done this week, but also what am I not going to get done this week.” The longer you set these standards for yourself within your team, the more you can take back ownership of your day.
Alright— on to delegation. I’ll say it again, delegation starts with trust. You have to let those little birds fly on their own, y’all. In an ideal world, the role of being a manager should have a planned obsolescence, right? A perfectly efficient team is a self managing team. So take a step back, humble yourself, and understand that you’ll be managing people that know a lot more than you. And even if they don’t at the beginning, you have to let your team execute tasks in the way they want to execute them. Odds are, they’ll make mistakes. But that mistake is more importantly a point where they can learn. And that’s something they just wouldn’t get if you gave them a prescriptive method to do every task.
Listen, if you want to be in leadership you have to be okay with understanding that your role is to help your team learn and get to the next stage of their career. And that’s not always going to be an easy thing to do.
Okay, do we feel ready to take on next week? You’re not going to get it all done, and that’s okay. You’re going to quit helicopter mom-ing those tasks you’re delegating to your team.
Clearly Kelly is a wealth of knowledge, so if you’re interested in more of her words of wisdom you can sign up for her newsletter (you can never have too many newsletters) at engineeringleadership.xyz
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