At some point in the past, I was listening to a professional development seminar and they were stressing that delegation is the most important skill to have and explaining how to delegate well. The general thrust of the message was that you should focus on doing the work that only you can do, and if someone else can do it then you should delegate that out. That way, you’re doing the most valuable work possible all the time because only you could have done that work; in other words, the work that if you hadn’t done it, it wouldn’t have gotten done well, or at all.
This picture has nothing to do with anything, but seriously… what is going on with that Windows XP sweater?
While I have tried to practice this as much as possible, I disagree with the sentiment that delegation is the most important skill for those of us in IT. Instead, I think the most important skill is prioritization. For instance, let’s look at knowledge transfer: if there is something that only you can do because of a skills gap, then you need to do your best to train or develop someone else so they can do it, too. After all, being single-threaded in anything is a recipe for disaster as soon as you’re on a plane heading out on vacation or somewhere else. But is that a delegation problem or a prioritization issue?
Many moons ago, a colleague and I were headed to a conference that used to be pretty good (I think it has long since been shuttered) called WinConections that was run by Penton Media. It was where I went back when I was Microsoft-centric to hear from Mark Russinovich, Mark Minasi, Tony Redmond, and others who were the big names in Windows and Exchange. Since I was pretty early in my career, just being able to be in a room and ask these titans of tech questions was a thrill I would look forward to for months.
Anyways, the conference was in Las Vegas and I had flown in from Boston late the night before. Like most east-coasters, I crashed as soon as I hit the hotel room because despite it only being around 11:30 Pacific time my circadian rhythm was convinced that it was almost 3 am (and rightly so.) The following morning I woke up incredibly early by PST standards and was in the hotel gym sometime around 4:45 AM. I got a full workout in and came back to my room shortly before 6 am to get ready for the day and noticed my message waiting light was blinking on the hotel phone. I looked at my flip phone (that I had left in the room) and saw a bunch of missed calls. Uh oh.
Long story short: the new blade chassis I had just rolled into production a few weeks ago had suffered a network failure and had not failed over to the backup board. Further, no one left in the office knew how to manage it. I actually eventually got my intern on the line and convinced him to physically remove one of the network boards to force it to failover to the other switch. The point of all of this is that I was the only one who could successfully manage that environment, and I had failed to properly share the knowledge I had; in simple terms, I had failed to delegate the responsibility for running that system.
In retrospect, I missed something essential and it wasn’t just that I hadn’t trained someone else - it was that I had failed to prioritize the knowledge sharing. It was always part of the plan to get it done. In fact, the colleague I few to Vegas with and I talked about how to get him some hands-on time with the HP c7000 blade environment after we returned. It just wasn’t a high enough priority to have been done before I left, and that was entirely my mistake. So it’s not just a matter of delegating properly but making sure that you’re prioritizing what’s most important that ultimately makes you effective.
Migrate all of this to Azure in a month? Check.
Focus on my career growth over the next year? Eh… maybe next month.
I want to spend the rest of this post talking about prioritization. Naturally, those of us in IT tend to be reasonably good at this when it comes to break/fix or new installations. We almost intuitively know what we need to do and in what sequence to do it in order to get something back online or bring something up as quickly as possible. However, I’ve seen far too many IT professionals lack the same clarity about what tasks or goals can move their career forward. In other words, IT pros seem to have this weird problem of being great at prioritization day-to-day, but horrible at prioritizing year-to-year, which is what really boosts your career.
First, let’s start with something that I think is a universal truth that you may or may not agree with: you do not have enough time to do everything that you should do. It’s okay if you don’t agree – that just makes you wrong. This is true in the office and true in your personal life. You simply don’t have enough productive hours in the day (or enough hours at all) to get it all finished. Every day you will have a longer list of stuff to do if you attempt to do it all. Would you like some proof? Sure thing – when’s the last time you cleaned out the filter in your dishwasher? When’s the last time you left the office thinking that you have no idea what you’re going to do tomorrow because everything is done? No? Never? Exactly.
“Steve,” I hear you say, “this is supposed to be about prioritization – but you’re talking about time management.” You’re right – and also wrong at the same time. Time management and prioritization are tightly linked, because you can schedule yourself until you’re blue in the face and have your whole day color coded - but if you aren’t prioritizing your work properly, you’re likely going to be spending a lot of well-scheduled time on something that won’t improve your organization or your life.
A friend of mine, Ariel, recommended that I read the book Eat That Frog! about a year ago when the pandemic started and I haven’t read a better book on prioritization before or since. The premise of the book is very simple: find the most important thing you have to do in a day, and do it first thing in the morning. Do it before you do anything else, and you’ll see quick improvements in your work and life because the most impactful stuff will be getting done and you won’t have to stress about getting it done all day. Obviously, there’s a bit more to the book and I recommend you read it, but the thrust is that your life and career will get better if you do the hardest, most difficult work first – which is usually the most impactful.
Sometimes it may be difficult to know what the most impactful work you can be doing is, but I want to give you four things to think about to try to figure out what is the most important work you should be prioritizing and then spending your time on.
First up: is this something your boss has said is really important? If so, listen to your boss. Unless your manager is known for saying everything is really important or exaggerating routinely, then you would be doing yourself a significant disservice by not prioritizing something your boss has told you is important. While this may seem entirely obvious, I (and many others) have been guilty of getting so heads down on a project or task that when my boss gives me something and tells me they want it prioritized, I set it to the side and think “I’ll get to it in a minute.” Guess what happens? I promptly forget about it. Don’t do that. If your boss tells you it’s important - treat it that way.
Second: look at the work through the lens of your goals. If you are attempting to be promoted, and you have some work that will get you the opportunity to present an idea in front of your skip level manager – you should weigh that into your decision. It may not have a definitive deadline, but if you want to get facetime with your boss’ boss to impress them, then that may be more important than something else on your plate. Alternatively, if your goal is to get a project off of your plate, you may need to prioritize knowledge transfer so that someone else can do the work and it’s not always your responsibility. Otherwise, you may never get rid of that albatross.
Third: think through what the consequences are of not doing something. For instance, the impacts of not automating a task that you need to do manually might only be that you spend more time doing something boring and repetitive. However, the impact of not properly communicating an upcoming change may end up damaging the reputation of IT to the business it serves. And if you’re the one responsible for damaging the reputation of IT, you can rest assured that your CIO will not be happy. The point is if there is little to no impact of not doing something, then it very well may not be worth doing. However, if there is a severe impact of missing a deadline or not doing something at all, you should likely prioritize that work and do it sooner.
You only have so many hours in the day - best not to spend them wondering if this watch matches your wardrobe.
It doesn’t.
Finally - and in homage to the talk I was referring to in my opening paragraphs - think through if this is a task or project that you are best suited to do. If there is someone else on your team who can do the project just as well as you can (or better) it may be a good candidate to collaborate on or simply transfer to a colleague. Of course, not everyone is in a position to swap work with others on the team, but if you are in a position to either delegate to someone you supervise or have the ability to trade projects or tasks with a colleague, be certain to consider it. Years ago, the admin who sat one cube over from me loved working in Commvault managing backups, and I was more interested in planning P2V migrations. Of course I think I got the better end of that deal, but we both ended up doing work we enjoyed because I’d give him my backup tasks and he’d give me migrations he needed to get done.
Once you know what the most important tasks are, make sure you prioritize getting them done using any time management program that you use. Some people I know are big into the Eisenhower or Franklin-Covey matrix, and some really enjoy using manual hand-written planners like a Day-Timer. I tend to use Todoist.com and manage my time via Outlook, but I’m not here to prescribe how you should. The point is, you need to write down your tasks in the order of most important to least important, and focus on doing the most important work – sometimes at the expense of the less important work which you may need to simply let fall off the table.
Before I conclude, if you feel like if you are just grinding hard for many, many hours each week and you can’t make a dent in the work that is all terribly consequential if it doesn’t get done, you need to have a conversation with your boss. I don’t know your situation, but I do know that if you can’t do your job in a reasonable amount of time there is a problem. If you’re routinely working until late at night, can’t ever get any time to recover or enjoy your life, and get called on the carpet for missing tasks or anything like that – something has to give. You’re not a robot and your employer cannot reasonably expect you to be one. If you can’t get any margin from your boss, you may need to consider whether this job is the right fit for you. Do not stay at a job that is abusing you. You deserve some work-life balance. We all have periods where it gets crazy, but that shouldn’t be your normal, every-day existence.
To summarize, you should spend as much time as possible on work that is impactful and valued by the company. You should try to spend as little time as possible on work that someone else could (or should) do or has little to no impact if it doesn’t get done at all. A great way to make sure you’re doing this is to order your tasks from most impactful and least impactful and then do them - in that order. By prioritizing your tasks effectively, you will not only appear to be more productive and effective, you actually will be.
Questions for reflection:
Do you feel like you are focusing on the most important task in front of you at any given time?
How much time in a given week do you think you are wasting on low-value and unimportant tasks?
What is the impact to your career of not prioritizing your work if you look a year out? What about five years?
