105 hours: Allocate time for work

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

Many of us will spend most hours of the year working.

That's a lot of hours, but many of us haven't even decided how many hours that should be.

A pay raise in time instead of money

Earlier in my career, I discovered that unlike big corporations, small startups (1-50 people) could be flexible with how much they pay you. They're strapped for cash but don't have as many rules.

My first performance raise at a big corporation was 1.5%. I then changed jobs to another big corporation, and my pay doubled.

Then I joined a small startup for less than I was making at my last gig. I knew I could get a higher-paying job elsewhere, so one day, I asked for a raise – and got it.

A few years later, I started interviewing and got a competing offer about 30% higher at a similarly sized but better-funded company.

I told my manager I'd stay if he got on that ballpark, but that ~30% was too much for me to walk on.

He said he'd like to keep me, but the company couldn't afford it. So I offered:

"What if you paid me 75% of that rate for 30 hours a week of work?"

He agreed.

Note I didn't ask for 75% of the rate for 75% of the usual time I spent working. I said, "75% of that rate for 30 hours a week."

About ten years into my professional career, that was the first time I was clear about how much time I had allocated to work.

I'm not talking about knowing how many hours I worked on average. I'm not talking about how many hours I strived to work if everything went well or how many hours I worked when things went wrong. And I'm not talking about how many hours some working agreement says I should work at a minimum – usually 40 hours.

I'm talking about clearly knowing how many hours I planned to work in a week.

How many hours a week do you work?

People struggle with this question not because they don't track their time but because they don't know how many hours in their week are allocated to work.

It's not that we don't know how well we're doing against the plan; we don't even know what the plan is!

It's only possible to plan 105 hours of the week if we know what is allocated to work and what is to be allocated elsewhere. How could I plan how to use my time outside of work if I don't know how much time there is to allocate?

Sometimes when talking about the importance of allocating time for work, I hear the pushback that work hours can't be planned; that planning work hours leads to lower performance:

"You allocate to work as many hours as work needs you to allocate at that particular moment to do the work!" they say. Or some variation of it.

But I believe clarity over how many hours are allocated to work is also critical for my high performance at work for at least two fundamental reasons:

1. It enables me to focus
2. It focuses me on outcomes

Focus

The first reason is that clarity about the scarcity of time acts as back pressure to help me focus.

Breaking the illusion that I can always dedicate more time forces me to face the reality that my time is limited and needs to be strategically allocated to activities with the highest leverage.

Companies use budgets to outline how they plan to allocate their limited capital because awareness of limits and smart allocation go hand in hand. It's preposterous to claim that scrapping a company budget and pretending money is infinite would automatically lead to a more efficient and wise capital allocation. It'd instead lead to inefficiency and waste.

So I use a similar approach for allocating my time as companies do with their money. They're both tactics for efficient use and wise application of scarce and valuable work resources.

By being careful about how much of my time to invest, I become selective: I spend time on the most important things, the essential activities.

Crucially, I say no, and don't spend time on the least important things. I know there's only so much time to go around. Precisely how much.

Here's Greg Mackown in his book Essentialism, reporting on a Silicon Valley executive's transformation when he starts focusing on the most important activities:

Emboldened, he began to apply this selective criteria to everything, not just direct requests. In his past life he would always volunteer for presentations or assignments that came up last minute; now he found a way to not sign up for them. He used to be one of the first to jump in on an e-mail trail, but now he just stepped back and let others jump in. He stopped attending conference calls that he only had a couple of minutes of interest in. He stopped sitting in on the weekly update call because he didn’t need the information. He stopped attending meetings on his calendar if he didn’t have a direct contribution to make. He explained to me, “Just because I was invited didn’t seem a good enough reason to attend.”
It felt self-indulgent at first. But by being selective he bought himself space, and in that space he found creative freedom. He could concentrate his efforts on one project at a time. He could plan thoroughly. He could anticipate roadblocks and start to remove obstacles. Instead of spinning his wheels trying to get everything done, he could get the right things done. His newfound commitment to doing only the things that were truly important — and eliminating everything else —restored the quality of his work. Instead of making just a millimeter of progress in a million directions he began to generate tremendous momentum towards accomplishing the things that were truly vital.

Mckeown, Greg . Essentialism (pp. 2-3). Crown. Kindle Edition.

Focus on Outcomes

The second reason is that time allocation helps me focus on outcomes instead of activities.

Productivity is measured by outcomes. Results. Awareness of limited time to invest helps me think about efficiency: how can I achieve results while also investing my resources efficiently?

A lack of awareness of time constraints leads to an over-investment of effort, often by self-described perfectionists. It's what I call the 120-180 rule.

120-180 rule: Getting 120% of the results for 180% of the effort.

This extra effort should have been directed elsewhere where it'd led to better overall business outcomes. Time is not infinite, no matter how hard we pretend it is.

Focus on outcomes is successfully practiced elsewhere by incredibly competent individuals, but I'm fascinated by the almost unbelievable productivity of author Robert Pozen as reported in his book Extreme Productivity:

People often ask me how I get so much done. During most of the last five years, I’ve held two full-time jobs—serving as full-time chairman of MFS Investment Management and carrying a full teaching load at Harvard Business School. I’ve also served on the governing boards of two publicly traded companies (Medtronic and Nielsen), a health care foundation (the Commonwealth Fund), and a medical research center (the Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center). At the same time, I’ve managed to write three books (including this one) and publish roughly a hundred articles in newspapers and magazines. [..] In reflecting upon productivity over my career, I can point to a number of habits and methods that have helped me become successful. But even more critical was the realization early in my career that success comes not just from hard work and careful planning — though those are both important. Success depends in large part on a proper mind-set: focusing on the results you plan to achieve, rather than the number of hours you work. The results are what matter most to your employer, clients, and colleagues.

Pozen, Robert C.. Extreme Productivity (pp. 6-7). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Clarity about the scarcity of time provides the required constraint to push me out of optimizing local activities, urgent and loud demands, and rote meetings and to think hard about my overall success criteria and how I should strategically focus my limited time to achieve the best overall results.

It's about clarity

Allocating time for work isn't about working less, having a better work-life balance, or being lazy.

It's about being clear and deliberate about how we're investing this valuable and scarce resource.

A company budget can be stingy or generous, regardless of whether it's a clear, detailed, and realistic good budget or a vague, ambiguous, and delusional bad one.

Allocating time for work is about being deliberate and taking control and responsibility for our time.

Allocating time for work also doesn't mean you'll never work past your allocated hours; company and project budgets go over budget all the time!

But many people today don't even know what over budget means for their work hours. After all, how can you know if you're doing overtime if you don't know what "time" is?

So I invite you to reflect on your answer to the question: "how many hours a week do you work?"

Not only will it be beneficial to your life outside of work, but it will also improve your work performance.

Or, if all else fails, at the very least, it will give you some evidence next time you're at that terribly run meeting and the thought "I really don't have time for this shit" crosses your mind!