How to make time to optimize

How to balance dedicating the time needed to make things better while addressing day-to-day demands?

One way is to clearly define 3 kinds of focus:

• Minimal focus: We'll keep this on auto-pilot, maintain with the minimal effort necessary.
• Standard mode: We'll invest in this at the usual rate, expecting its usual output (good or bad).
• Optimization focus: We'll focus on optimizing this, typically expecting long-term capacity improvements.

Most leadership decisions, at work and in life, are about how to strategically allocate areas to these 3 categories.

Focus on Recruiting meant not focusing on HR

I was COO, and we had just parted ways with our Head of People. Our yearly headcount plan had a lot of hires on it, and our last recruiter had just left. I was backfilling the leadership role until we hired a new leader.

Rebuilding the recruiting team meant not only that recruiting was my focus, but that HR was NOT my focus.

Every week, one leader presented their department's goals and progress to the extended leadership team. On my turn, my presentations always started with a big slide:

Recruiting is our team's focus. HR is NOT our team's focus.

The slide was accompanied by my reassurance, but also clarity: "I know it sounds bad, you valued company employee listening to me right now, to hear that you aren't the focus. But we're all focused on building a recruiting team and ensuring we make the hires we need to hit our goals."

This clarity made it easy, both internally and externally, to make trade-off decisions:

• Take on more interviews? Yes.
• Improve our onboarding? No.
• Invest in LinkedIn Recruiter? Yes.
• Invest in LinkedIn 360 Learning? No.

We have limited resources to invest, and while some resources are tangible, such as money, others are much less tangible, such as time and attention.

In my experience, time and attention are some of the most critical yet overlooked things needed to drive optimization.

Without optimization, you'll win the short-term battles but lose the long-term war.

In this case, we did win the long-term war: we managed to build a recruiting team and hit the goals in our headcount plan that year. But only because we didn't make much progress in HR during that time.

Every decision to focus on one area means another gets less attention.

The necessary constraints and trade-offs of work

Every decision to do something, in a world where constraints are limited, is a decision to not do something else.

We don't typically decide not to focus on the long term. We do it implicitly by frequently deciding to focus on the short term.

Like an employee that says, "I don't have time to exercise" or "I don't have time to eat well" because of work, the decision is more about the work than it is about not taking care of their health.

The only way to know how your decisions are impacting all areas under your control is to have a holistic view of every area competing for resources and how much you're investing in each.

It's the same with work, no matter how you categorize your areas. You can categorize them by:

• Each individual in your department.
• Each team you lead.
• Stream-aligned teams, enabling teams and platform team.
• Focus on people, processes, or tools.

In any case, there is some division of areas under your control, and you have limited resources to invest in each. Investing in one means not investing that same resource in the other.

Neglecting long-term focus typically looks like this:

• Not letting go of an under-performer because you need to deliver on your current project.
• Not paying off technical debt and making code more maintainable because you must finish that feature.
• Spending your time on the person that is likely to leave in the next year instead of the one that's likely to stay.

These decisions are automatic and typically have a high level of business pressure on them, making them hard to avoid.

Like with our personal lives, nobody chooses to be unhealthy "just because." Our short-term decisions typically make sense in isolation, and only seem problematic when looked at as a whole.

This discipline, to focus on one area over others, is hard to build.

Particularly when everything seems to be on fire.

Focus even if everything needs attention

Here's a very, very important thing to remember:

By definition, you can't focus on everything.

The only time you can split your focus evenly is when everything is going well – that's the only time when it's ok to not have a focus. You can't improve everything by focusing on everything.

In Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt talks about an Italian manufacturer who had issues with quality, sales, and cost and didn't know where to start:

Any payoff from better-quality machines was diluted because the sales force could not accurately represent their qualities and performance. A better sales force, by itself, would have added little value without better machines. And improvements in quality and sales would not save the firm unless costs were reduced.

How did he fix it? By separately focusing on each of those areas for a whole year over the following 3 years.

I conducted three campaigns, one after another. In the first campaign we spent twelve months just on quality. I told the employees that everything we did for the next year would be to make our machines the best in the industry, the most reliable and the fastest.

Once we had good quality machines, I focused entirely on the sales function. The salespeople had been involved in the quality campaign, and now the engineers and manufacturing people worked with sales to build skills, selling tools, and communications links back to the factory. Market results were slow in coming, but I knew we had to make these investments first to reap benefits later.

Rumelt, Richard. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (pp. 118-119). Crown. Kindle Edition.

On what Richard Rumelt calls chain-link systems, sometimes to unlock outcomes you need all areas to improve. Effectively improving all areas, though, still requires you to focus on each of them at a time.

But how do you articulate which areas you're focusing on?

Minimal, standard, and optimization focus

I believe there are 3 types of focus on areas under our control:

• Minimal focus: We'll keep this on auto-pilot, maintain with the minimal effort necessary.
• Standard mode: We'll invest in this at the usual rate, expecting its usual output (good or bad).
• Optimization focus: We'll focus on optimizing this, typically expecting long-term capacity improvements.

When everything is working great, and nothing needs improvement, everything can run on standard mode. This is when your attention is evenly and adequately split across different areas.

In my VC-backed startup leadership experience, it's never good to run everything on standard mode. Be it because your startup is scaling, challenges are increasing, or the market is changing, there's always something that needs focus and optimization.

The focus you need on an area must come at the detriment of focusing on other areas. You typically can't run everything in standard mode, plus an optimization focus on one (or more!) areas.

Focusing on an area means other areas get the short end of the stick: minimal focus. This means that you'll keep them on auto-pilot and run with as little intervention as possible.

Like balancing on a surf-board, balanced focus means focus on one area at a time, as needs change and you focus on the other one to keep your balance.

Because it's hard to make too many improvements at once, it's also hard to optimize too many areas at once. Even optimizing more than a single area can be really challenging.

So, let's do a quick exercise to put it into practice.

Defining your 3 areas of focus

If you're doing this exercise for your personal life, such as family, health, or a hobby, and you're content with everything, maybe it's ok to keep everything in standard mode.

But if you work at a VC-backed startup, you probably need to define an optimization area, one or more minimal focus areas, and keep the other areas running on standard mode.

So try it out:

1. Think about the areas you want or need to optimize
2. List the other areas competing for your focus on those areas
3. Assign the area you're doing optimization focus
4. Assign the areas on minimal focus to make space for it
5. Assign all other areas to standard mode

That's it! It's simple but not easy.

Deprioritization is hard. Assigning an area to minimal focus means, "This won't be a focus, so I have to keep it on auto-pilot," and that sounds negative, but not optimizing your area in need of optimization is typically even more negative.

We just have a false belief that we can improve on everything while deliving on everything. We can't.

So take a moment now: list out your areas, identify the first one under optimization focus, and make the hard decision to put some areas on minimal focus while keeping others on standard mode.

Embrace the reality that optimization requires true focus, and that true focus is the key to sustained, long-term improvement.