Busywork

“We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”

— Oliver Burkeman

Solving Problems, Managing Messes

We spend a lot of time organizing, categorizing, recording and completing our work. In our personal lives we might have calendars, sticky notes or planners. In our professional lives we might have excel, Jira or other project management tools. Despite an endless sea of methods, it can often feel like we are overwhelmed, stressed and the list of things to do is infinite.

That’s because it is.

Reality is messy, always changing. Perfection is impossible without pouring an infinite amount of time into something, to the detriment of everything else. If you say “yes” to one thing, you momentarily say “no” to every other choice. Choose wisely.

Faced with a constant slew of challenges, and buffeted by the chaos of the real world, how are we supposed to tackle work effectively?

Enter Rory Vaden’s “Focus Funnel Model”.

The Focus Funnel Model

In the book “Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time”, Rory Vaden outlines the Focus Funnel Model. The idea of the model is to take a task and run it through a set of filters instead of just diving in to work on it immediately. The filters will allow you to prioritize what truly matters, instead of blindly putting your head down and trying to work on them one by one.

Focus Funnel Model

A visual representation of the model, inputs and filters.

One caveat, goal identification is incredibly important (as always) prior to using the model. Identifying you goal provides the context that allows you to apply the model correctly. You cannot make good decisions without a clear, robust, defined goal.

Filter 1: Eliminate

Question: “Is this really valuable?”

This first filter is about removing tasks that do not add value. Oftentimes we fill up our to-do list with things that just aren’t worth doing. For example, you may have a regular, standing meeting at work. If your calendar is full, and the meeting isn’t really contributing to your goals, cancel it. You might think you need to make a couple presentation slides for an upcoming meeting later in the day, when you can just as easily convey the information over a video call. Don’t make the presentation, eliminate the task.

Filter 2: Automate

Question: “Can I make a regular, standardized process for this?”

The second filter deals with tasks that are repetitive. Sometimes these tasks can be automated or handled by a standardized process. This can increase efficiency and save loads of time in the long run.

Let’s say project manager regularly updates the status of work packages she is tracking in an excel file. She then manually tallies up the remaining work, adds all the time remaining and then calculates the estimated delivery date for the project. Since she does this daily, this takes up quite a bit of time. It would behoove her to instead use calculations in excel to automatically sum the time remaining for all incomplete work packages and display the estimated date.

If a process takes 20 minutes per day and automating it reduces it to 5 minutes per day, you save yourself roughly 65 hours of work per year (assuming you work Monday – Friday). Automating repetitive tasks in this manner can snowball into huge time savings.

Filter 3: Delegate

Question: “Should someone else do this task?”

The third step of the focus funnel model handles task delegation. Assuming the task is something you need to do and cannot be automated; the next filter is determining if you should delegate the task to someone else.

For example, a lead engineer on a team of five engineers might delegate specific technical tasks because other junior engineers want to develop skills associated with these tasks. The lead engineer might delegate some tasks to other employees if they are more suited to their roles. If a customer has a question about negotiating an existing contract, the engineer might delegate this task to an account executive. It is more appropriate for sales staff to take the lead on contract negotiation, even if the lead engineer may be involved in pre-sales activity.

Delegation is not about being lazy. It is about assigning tasks to the correct individual and it requires the correct context. In the example of the lead engineer above, it might be less efficient in the short term to delegate work to a more junior engineer. However, the junior engineer will be able to develop more skills in the long term and ultimately contribute more to the organization. Being intentional about considering this context when delegating tasks is one of the things that separates incredible leaders from mediocre leaders.

Filter 4: Procrastinate

Question: “Do I need to do this now?”

Procrastination has a negative association but can be an effective tool. We are often swamped with hundreds of different things to do, most of which will never get done. Intentional procrastination helps put off less important tasks.

A manager might be tasked with providing an engineer with feedback. At the same time the manager, and his team, are also actively solving an outage affecting thousands of customers. The manager should “procrastinate” on delivering feedback for the engineer until the outage is solved. This is an extreme case, but highlights when procrastination is the right choice.

In the book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb articulates the following:

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad – at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.”

The key takeaway here is that immediately intervening and acting is not always the right choice. Oftentimes, things can sort themselves out as well.

This step of the focus funnel model is about deprioritizing things that are less important.

Filter 5: Eliminate

Decision: “I’m going to focus on this.”

Assuming the task made it through all four filters, the last step is to focus on the task. Remove distractions and knock it out of the park. It’s as simple as that.

The Focus Funnel Model gives us a logical structure for navigating a constantly changing list of things to do. We can use its filter to quickly assess the tasks worth concentrating on. We do this by:

  1. Eliminating unnecessary tasks
  2. Automating repetitive tasks
  3. Delegating tasks to others
  4. Procrastinating on tasks that are not immediately important
  5. Concentrating on tasks that matter

This model helps rapidly assess where to focus their efforts to deliver value immediately. Instead of completing tasks for the sake of completing them, we can be more intentional about what we choose to work on and be more effective in the process.

Learn More

  • Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman
  • Procrastinate on Purpose – Rory Vaden