Technical Leader Worries: I Have Too Many Things to Do

Those wonderful days when the only thing you did was writing code are gone. Now you are a leader. You are doing everything: attending or conducting meetings, removing impediments, mediating between team members and the rest of the organization, reading or writing some kind of reports (and you deceive yourself that spending two hours in Excel counts as programming because of some smartly used formulas) and so on. You are in a hurry all the time, and it never ends.

Today, I would like you to get familiar with one useful technique. Before you put a task on your TODO list, ask three questions.

Treat these questions as something to elaborate about. These are just reminders. I will explain in short what is going on.

Is Me the Best Person to Do the Task?

The business world is busy, fast, and many things are not well analyzed. I remember that many times I assigned a task to somebody without much thought, and that person wasn’t the best one to address the subject. Especially if you are a leader, ask yourself:

• Does this task need to be done by my team?
• Should I personally do this task?

Many times people in the team are able to do the task, allowing you to focus on your leader activities (where you are not easily replaceable). If you use a pull model (like Kanban), place this task on a team board.

Does It Have to Be Done Now?

How many times have you experienced a situation where something had to be done by a specific date, and then a few days later, after asking, “How about that report?” you get in response: “Oh, I didn’t have time to look at this.”

“Ughhhhhh… So why did I work overtime?” - you think and feel disappointed.

I can tell you why. Because you didn’t ensure that it really had to be done by that date. (Of course, even doing so, you will not eliminate such situations entirely.)

You may ask (suppose today is Wednesday):

• “I am doing X, Y, Z and I would like to have them done because …. Would it be a problem if I completed this task on Monday?”

Or very similarly (if a task or feature is addressed to the whole team):

• “We are doing X, Y, Z now, and we would like to get them done because … (explain). Would it be a problem if we started to work on the feature on Monday?”

Does It Have to Be Done in the Particular Way?

If a task definition specifies how the task should be done, ensure that this is the best way (especially if there is not much time). Make sure that you know the goal (why this task should be done at all and why it should be done this way). If you know the goal, you may suggest easier or simpler alternatives.

Encourage Your Teammates to Do the Same

This is such a good tool that it is worth spreading. Many leaders are a little afraid that team members will start to negotiate the tasks, and it will be the beginning of a rebellion. But you should welcome this with understanding (and I know it is not easy). By practicing this technique, people learn to look critically at what happens in the project, and you shorten the feedback loop. This is a great way to increase the probability of eliminating work that shouldn’t be done or simplifying solutions. This is also a good exercise to strengthen trust in your team. Only people who feel safe (and this is the base for trust) are eager to ask questions like these.

(Text translated and moved from original old blog automatically by AI. May contain inaccuracies.)