The magical world of prioritisation. How to win promotions and get pay rises the idle way

January 15, 2019 10 By Caveman

One of the inescapable facts about adulting is that almost all of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work. Even worse it’s not as if the rest of the time around that is for us to do what we like. We spend the time between waking up and starting work getting ready for work and then getting to work.  Although you can build yourself a humdinger of a morning routine to ease into that. Evenings are a bit better and you may can have a few hours to do what you want before bed.

But of course most of us don’t stop work at the 5pm. We certainly don’t stroll across town to get home. The average UK commute is just under an hour at 54 minutes with those of us lucky enough to work in London clocking in 74 minutes or around an hour and a quarter. What that means for most of us is that once we get home there’s maybe an hour or two for ourselves. By that point though many (most?) of us don’t have the energy to do anything other than watch a couple of episodes of something on Netflix while eating our tea on the sofa and browsing social media. If you have children or other caring responsibility and chores or admin to get through then that time is squeezed further.

Why is there always so much to do?

Optimising work time

We know all about the benefits of stopping, or cutting back, on full time work in the FI community. What we talk about less is optimising work hours. We spend vast quantities of time and energy at work so we should try to get the most out of our time there. Obviously what “getting the most from work” means will vary by person and over time. For some people that’ll mean walking out of the door at 5pm on the dot each day. For others it will mean seeking a job that they love so they’re excited to get into work every day. Others will want to get as much money as they can and will do whatever it takes to get it.

However, I guess that most of us see work an exchange. Specifically we exchange our time, and physical and/or mental energy for money. That doesn’t have to mean that we hate our job but the overarching reason that we are there is to earn a wage.

Given that, it follows that what we should be doing is seeking to minimise the time and energy that we expend while maximising the cash that we get in return. Books like Tim Ferris’s four-hour work week have made an excellent crack at this but his approach is a bit too well, confident, for someone like me. What I’m going to do is to start what’s going to be an occasional series with my experiences on how to get the most buck for our bang [See what I did there? I know. It’s a gift]. Specifically if we have a propensity for idleness, how we can maximise our earnings?

Today I start with the gift of prioritisation.

The big secret of work: Most things don’t matter

It took me a few years to get there but eventually I worked out one of the big secrets about work: Most things in work don’t matter (by contrast a few things REALLY matter). Despite that people treat the important and unimportant things exactly the same. Now I went along with this for a while, a long while in fact. I mean that’s what you do in your first years at work isn’t it? You do what you’re told. You assume that the more senior people in the organisation actually know what they’re doing. [I know, I was young and foolish. What can I say?]

By the time I hit my late 20s I’d changed jobs a few times and got a couple of promotions. The normal sort of thing that you get as a prize if you hang around long enough in most organisations. What I realised then was that almost no-one REALLY knew what they were doing. Most relevantly to this conversation is that I realised that people had no idea how to prioritise. Zero. Despite having to work long hours and getting stressed out no one could tell the important from the unimportant.  That meant they were stressed as they were running around doing stacks of work that really didn’t matter.

So I decided that I wouldn’t play that game. I would focus on the things that were priorities and do them really well. Anything else would fit into the rest of my time or not get done.

How to prioritise at work. Only two things matter.

What companies actually care about

Having come up with my plan the question I had to answer was: How do I work out what is a priority? When everyone was screaming at me how do you decide?

For me prioritising in a commercial organisation is easy. There are only two things that matter, making money or saving money. That’s been true for me in all the commercial companies I’ve worked in. I know that sounds cynical and I’m sure that there are some great exceptions out there. The thing is that if you’ve ever been though a downsizing process at work you’ll have seen it in action. When the chips are down it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job and how much you’re furthering the vision of the company. If you’re not making money or saving money then your job is at risk. It’s why back office and marketing typically get cut deepest.

So today, if I can’t show how what I’m doing leads to saving or making money then I’m happy to push it down my To Do list or let it drop off entirely. To be clear I’m in a cost centre rather than a revenue centre and for me applying these tests is even more important.

The few exceptions to that was when I was getting chased for something by someone who mattered (not always more senior people). I’m not so arrogant so as to assume that I have perfect judgement on these things. A little bit of flexibility and openness to listening has gone a long way to stop me falling flat on my face with this approach.

How and why I prioritise in my interests and not just my employer’s

As an experienced idler I have a two stage approach to prioritisation. Stage 1: prioritise in the best interests of my company. Stage 2: Prioritise in my best interests. I’m in the position where I have so much I could do that there’s no way I can get it all done. Given that even priority items have to be dropped I’ll push other things off so that I can keep a personal life. Alternatively I prioritise those things that will do my career good – but as I get older that’s less important.

I don’t mean that to come across as overly cynical (again). I have the same level of loyalty to my company as it does to me. And, to be clear, my company does a lot that’s in my best interests: it gives me a salary, benefits, paid holiday, the ability to sometimes work from home, interesting work (as well as the dull stuff) and, autonomy. Overall I quite enjoy my job (although not enough to do it if I wasn’t paid). What that all means is that I want it to do well and I want to keep my job– but not at the expense of my sanity.

In practise there are some specific actions I take to do this.  Firstly, I restrict checking my email from home. Unless there’s a specific time limited deadline I don’t reply until I’m back at work.  Secondly I try to work a 9-5.30 day and I take at least 30 mins for lunch (ideally away from my desk). I’ve made myself comfortable with walking out of the door when people are still there. Finally I aim to work from home one day a week.

Resist the temptation to do this at home too often

You’re an idiot, Caveman. What about all the other work?

So I totally get your immediate challenge. Just not doing the work can get you into trouble. My solution to this was to learn how to, politely, not make other people’s problems my own.

Let me illustrate what I mean with a case study. This week a director stopped by my desk and asked me to write a report I thought was pointless. As he swanned off I suppressed my inclination to call him an idiot. Instead, I created an email chain to link up him and the other director I was working for to ask them to confirm what had the greater priority. In that email I made my recommendation and explained why I thought it was the right thing to do.  I also said that, unless they told me different that was what I was going to do. I’m senior enough that I can get away with that. But I also said I was happy to follow what they said. End result? I’m still doing the important work and this pointless report won’t be done.

In the past when I had less seniority it was even easier. I would go to my manager and tell them what I had on my plate and ask her or him to prioritise for me. I wouldn’t say that I couldn’t do it, but I would couch it in the terms of ensuring quality – it helps in those case to have a good data on how long the task should take so you don’t come across as a slacker. To close it out I would then email the other managers concerned, copying my own, to confirm what they had told me to do. The way I see it, handling prioritisation of my team’s time is part of what I’m paid to do.

For balance I have to confess that this doesn’t always work. I was in a meeting with my CEO and a couple of others a month or so ago and I tried this on him. His response was. “Yup Caveman I can see that’s a real Gordian knot. I’m sure that you’ll be able to work it out though.” Oh. Thanks boss. I appreciate the support. To be fair though I don’t get played like that too often! That’s why he earns the big bucks.

A few more caveats

Now this works for me partly  because of the job I have.  In particular I have a degree of autonomy. When I was at the bottom of the pile in a pub kitchen this wouldn’t have worked. My job was to make meals the way I’d been instructed. That was it. If I did, I wouldn’t get fired. Even if I could see how it could be done better, more efficiently, or more profitably no one was interested. It was the sort of job where you did what you were told . All I had to do was get things on the stove /deep fat fryer /hotplate/microwave/dishwasher as quickly as possible. That lack of autonomy was one of the reasons I realised that I didn’t want that kind of job for the rest of my life.

It was a bit like this but much less dramatic

It also works because, ironically, I have too much to do. If you’re in the position where you don’t have enough on your plate then you can’t just ditch all the pointless stuff and spend your days on Facebook. Even though you’ll still deliver the same value for your organisation, sadly most managers won’t see it that way.

Whenever I’ve found myself in this situation I have actively gone out to find more work. People love proactivity. This gives you the opportunity to find tasks that are either more interesting, or will develop new skills. Ideally it will do both. After a while you’ll then be able to get to prioritising but then you’ll also have the fall back that the dull stuff isn’t your core job so you can more easily refuse it.

Does it work?

This is clearly only my view.  It may be useless to others but this approach has helped my career hugely. Whenever anyone checks in on what I’m doing I can be sure that they will nod along and agree that it’s important. It’s also means that I do more interesting and valuable work. By focusing on doing what matters well I’m seen as clearly adding value to the company. Taken together it meant that senior people have paid attention to me and tried to retain me.

The other aspect is that I am perceived to operate at a higher level. It takes some self-confidence and people skills to be able to push back politely.  It also takes the judgement to know when NOT to push back.  To be honest it took me a while to learn that but, now I have, people respect me more.  We have adult to adult conversations and I don’t behave as a child.

Today I have a great work life balance. My job is genuinely interesting and I’m brought into the some of the critical board discussion.  The senior team see me as someone who needs to be involved in important decisions. One of my drivers is recognition of my value and this ticks my boxes.

Just one more thing…

A final point. One thing that hugely helped me with this was to have FU money. Well ahead of any idea of FI, just knowing that I, and my family, could survive if I was out of work gave me confidence. The more I’ve saved, the more confident I’ve got. It’s one of the ways the journey yields rewards not just the destination.

So that’s my experience. I don’t know if will work for anyone else but hopefully there will be elements that trigger some reflections.

Thoughts?

Do you prioritise at work?

How has it gone for you if you’ve ever pushed back at work?

Does any of this seem realistic for your situation (or am I just overly cocky)?

Have you ever tried anything like this?  Did it work?