Posted by I sometimes joke and say that when I work on something part-time, that is a normal person’s full time. As I say it, I know it comes out all wrong. Indeed, I don’t mean it as a statement of arrogance and self-importance. It is more related to my crazy (and often unhealthy) intensity. Whatever the meaning, it comes out all wrong still. Even for me. There are days when I crave normality.
Factory maintenance
As I devour’ The Portfolio Life‘, re-reading chapters, taking notes and even attempting to draft my own Venn Diagram; I stumble across an uncomfortable statement:
“For this model to thrive over the long term, it is critical that you build systems and set boundaries around your time, or you ‘ll put your entire portfolio at risk”
Christina Wallace, The Portfolio Life
She goes on to remind us of the concept of utilization and uses the analogy from the running of a factory, reminding us that a world class factory utilization would be… not 100%, but 85%! That allows time for maintenance, errors and the famous unexpected. And, by the way, whilst 85% is the benchmark for world-class manufacturing, typical factories may operate closer to 60%. (courtesy of ChatGPT).
And I go… but what are you meant to do with the remaining 15%? By the way, If you are wondering, utilization is calculated using available time In the denominator and, don’t worry, available time is net of sleep. I am not that bad.
Running at 85 %
A few years ago, one of my former bosses sat me down and told me:
“You have to get comfortable with running at 85% capacity.”
He argued I was too quick to fill my time with the next thing and that I often wondered if I could or should do more whenever something new came up, whether I had the capacity or not. And my first thing to do when I did have some capacity (under my standards) was to go think of something new to get involved in. Fact. The reality was that capacity for me was rarely a consideration. There was prioritisation, compromises and only rarely a few Nos. Things got added to the list but very rarely they came out. Likely helped by a background in banking where my normal day had 18-20 hours, when I suddenly was working 12-14 it seemed perfectly normal to fill all of them.
After this conversation, I spent a few weeks trying to figure out how to do this. He was a smart and very senior person, and he was not just giving me a pep talk. He thought this was important not only because of long term sustainability (health) but also because without this capacity I would not be able to create whitespace, where I could add even more value to the business (performance).
So the question was, how to go from running at 120%, already a downgrade from my M&A times, to maximum 100 or less. I talked to the team and encouraged them further to go home early in down times, nudging them after hours if what they were doing was truly essential. I had always been open about my after-work activities and encouraged them to do the same, but the focus here was on what not-to-do to create less friction, or else, more slack into the system. It was about saying “are we really the right people to do this?” or “is this really necessary?”. We looked at our book of work again and reviewed what could be outsourced, automated, or even better, removed all together.
“Taking something off your to-do list counts as completion.”
Thrive
Naturally, just because the boss suggested it does not mean the people around us got the memo. And let’s be clear, no matter how much sense this made, I struggled to accept it. Wasn’t I the person that could always run at 120%? Wasn’t that why I was successful, what made me special? If not that, then what?
Slack in the System
The key reason for running at 95% is that you need slack in the system.
“Systems with slack are more resilient.”
Seth Godin, quoted in HBR “Beware of a Culture of Busyness“
You need to allow for scheduled (and unscheduled) maintenance , for errors in the system, for unexpected orders or priority changes. One of my most defining moments years ago (personally and professionally), was when I was faced with a tough (half joking) question from a friend, which I must now have retold 5 times on this blog:
“Your life is like a domino, what if a piece falls?”
This question caused me anxiety but it also caused me pause. It showed me very visually I needed more space between the pieces, if not less pieces. It showed me I needed slack, and whilst I was not extremely successful
at finding it during work time, I did slowly start building a little bit of it into my non-work life. Specially in the post covid era, I was better able to block off days, without a filled social schedule to allow us all to recover. Lockdown had allowed some slack into my system (despite the constant presence of the little ones) and I could recognise that it helped me recharge better for my non-slack heavy work week.
I used to think moments unscheduled were just not efficient. But now I can see how nice it feels to actually account for travel time to go between things and not have the feeling of constant rush. Fun (or not) fact: my Oura ring has been tracking by stress, and a moment where I am overscheduled and back to back between places clearly shows a peak of stress in my system.
Stress and recovery
It is not difficult to guess how much my life was plagued by stress. Whilst I was always good at keeping rational perspective of my work and how It fitted In the broader context of the world, it was merely at the rational sphere:
“It is only money and it is not yours!”
Not to be named senior leader
So whilst I did not think of myself as doing God’s work (as a famous leader once claimed), the same cannot be said about the quantity of work I committed myself to do. I just had to run at that speed. At 150% capacity in pretty much every aspect of my life (luckily I never signed-up for the PTA). And by the way assuming the flow between the different areas needed no slack. In the last 2 years (especially after I moved and worked remotely), I was even more conscious about my time, carefully scheduling maintenance (sleep, exercise, physio), re-thinking my overall utilization by reducing my hours at the charity, cutting down on my writing, saying no in my personal life more often, schedule non commitment days in the weekend. What I only realized 2 years later was that my brain didn’t get reprogrammed and never stopped working, even if I thought I was “off”. It just kept processing what had to be done at 150% and therefore ran even faster when I was on. As a result, I stopped being off, even during my sleep. It’s like my factory went on overdrive but the red lights were broken. Earlier this year, I knew it was too late to pull the Andon Cord. My only solution would be a machine shutdown. It was time to recover.
Fighting the overdrive
If you have been around for a while , you won’t be surprised to find out that my system reset did not come out entirely clean. I feel like in one of those moments that you are about to leave and want to shutdown your laptop when you get the message:
‘Updating in progress, computer will restart when finished.”
My system was filled with critical updates that don’t want to wait for a shutdown. They have been waiting for me to do a computer restart in such a long time that they are all queuing up… It’s like all processes and programs that were running in the background, the multiple open tabs in my browser finally get to have a go. So I use the process to clean up some system utilization and shutdown unnecessary processes. And I embrace the updates and the clean-up of the disk-drive knowing eventually, I will be able to restart with a different capacity, buckets and definitely a different view on utilization.
It’s not what you are thinking. It’s not to speed up again, it is to create slack. So I can reach the famous 85%.
Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash