What Do You Do When Your Boss Allocates You to a Team Half-Time?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:04.720 | All right, let's do one more question about deep work.

00:00:09.720 | This one comes from Mr. S.

00:00:11.120 | Mr. S asks, what do you do when your boss has allocated you to a team halftime?

00:00:19.440 | He elaborates, I worked full-time on one team for my current employer.

00:00:25.560 | My boss has decided that we need to start on a new effort and has put me

00:00:29.760 | and one other person to work on this new effort.

00:00:31.320 | We were supposed to spend half our time on this new project and the other half

00:00:34.640 | on our old team, but I feel like I'm still allocated 100% to both teams now.

00:00:38.960 | It's exhausting.

00:00:40.440 | All right, Mr. S, here's my suggestion.

00:00:43.400 | Ask your boss specifically which half of my hours do you want me working on the new team?

00:00:49.280 | 50% as an abstract number means nothing.

00:00:53.240 | Should it be the mornings?

00:00:55.520 | Should it be the afternoons?

00:00:57.360 | Should it be two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon?

00:00:59.720 | I want the fix down boss, the hours when I'm working on team A and the hours

00:01:04.680 | in which I'm working on team B, and I am going to completely segregate these two efforts.

00:01:10.000 | You give a good reason for it.

00:01:12.200 | I'm a Cal Newport fan.

00:01:13.320 | Context switching is better to treat these like two separate jobs as opposed

00:01:16.640 | to mixing them together in one job, but then do that and then stick to that.

00:01:19.920 | If you want to have a meeting related to team A, it has to be scheduled in team A hours.

00:01:24.640 | If you want a meeting having to do with team B, it has to be scheduled in team B hours.

00:01:29.040 | If you're going to work on team A, it has to be in team A hours.

00:01:31.040 | If you're going to work on team B, it has to be in team B hours.

00:01:33.040 | It could be splitting the day in half.

00:01:34.320 | It could be splitting the week in half.

00:01:35.680 | Thursday, Friday is team B.

00:01:37.760 | Monday, Tuesday is team A, and we split Wednesday down the middle.

00:01:41.520 | But what you want here is specificity.

00:01:43.360 | When should this work happen?

00:01:45.600 | Now, there is a bigger point here I want to briefly emphasize,

00:01:50.000 | which is that in knowledge work writ large,

00:01:56.240 | a real issue we have is this push model of work allocation,

00:02:00.880 | where anyone can push work onto anyone else's plate,

00:02:05.200 | where it's up to them to figure out what to do with the mess.

00:02:07.520 | This is a disaster for overload.

00:02:11.120 | We get way too much work on our plate because there's no one regulating this.

00:02:15.360 | There's no one looking at how much is on your plate.

00:02:17.120 | There's no one saying what is reasonable.

00:02:18.960 | So we end up with way too much work on our plate.

00:02:22.080 | Can't make progress on all of it at the same time.

00:02:24.560 | So that is stressful, but it's not just stressful.

00:02:27.040 | Each of these things that's now on your plate brings with it some amount of fixed overhead.

00:02:32.480 | Emails about that work with people checking in,

00:02:35.200 | weekly meetings, you've had the schedule to make sure that progress is being made.

00:02:39.840 | And so when your plate gets full enough,

00:02:41.760 | the fixed overhead itself can take over most of your hours,

00:02:45.040 | squeezing out almost any of the time to actually get work done.

00:02:47.920 | So it's a huge problem.

00:02:50.400 | I'm a big believer in having a much more explicit allocation of work

00:02:55.040 | where we think through how much can you do?

00:02:57.120 | How much are you doing?

00:02:59.440 | Does it make sense to give you something else?

00:03:02.800 | I call this a pull-based method because you're basically pulling work into time you have available.

00:03:08.640 | So you're never oversubscribed,

00:03:10.960 | as opposed to a push method where any amount of work can be pushed towards you.

00:03:14.560 | This is roughly what I'm getting at, Mr. S,

00:03:16.960 | when I suggest that you ask your boss what hours

00:03:20.720 | what days do you actually want this 50% work to be done?

00:03:25.440 | Because what you're doing here is actually forcing

00:03:28.160 | work to account for when it's going to get done.

00:03:31.920 | Well, where are the hours where this is going to get done?

00:03:34.480 | That hour is already spoken for.

00:03:36.240 | You want to have a meeting here,

00:03:37.200 | but that hours have already been put aside for this other work.

00:03:39.200 | So now there's no time for your meeting.

00:03:40.480 | You're making explicit things take time.

00:03:43.120 | What time do you want me to give to this?

00:03:44.640 | And honestly, I think there should be a bigger effort to do this with more work.

00:03:49.920 | I wrote about this in a world without email,

00:03:52.080 | that when it comes to, for example, service work among professors,

00:03:56.800 | that there should be a specific budget.

00:04:00.320 | Here is how many hours of service work you are allowed to do max per week.

00:04:05.760 | And when things get assigned to you,

00:04:07.280 | you actually have to estimate how many hours you're going to spend on.

00:04:11.040 | In fact, put those hours aside.

00:04:12.720 | Here they are on my calendar when I'm working on this.

00:04:14.720 | If you want to talk to me about this, it's on my public calendar.

00:04:18.400 | And when those hours are filled up, nothing else can come to you.

00:04:21.600 | Yes, this would create a problem at first,

00:04:23.120 | because there's all these people that want you to do things.

00:04:25.040 | Like I know your hours are full, but this is important.

00:04:27.200 | But you know what?

00:04:27.680 | That back pressure reforms the system.

00:04:29.360 | And less of these requests are allowed to be generated.

00:04:32.560 | And more of these requests generating entities

00:04:36.000 | have to figure out other ways to get their work done.

00:04:38.000 | So I don't mean to go on a big rant here,

00:04:39.520 | but the unregulated allocation of work and knowledge work is a disaster.

00:04:43.760 | It's convenient.

00:04:46.000 | It's flexible.

00:04:48.640 | But it is a terrible way to get work done.

00:04:51.200 | It's like running a car factory where, you know,

00:04:54.800 | everyone comes in and you just say,

00:04:56.560 | guys, there's a bunch of parts around here, you do you,

00:04:59.040 | like we're just going to kind of build cars.

00:05:00.560 | It's yeah, it's convenient.

00:05:02.000 | It's flexible, but nothing's going to get done.

00:05:05.360 | Or if it does, the cars are gonna get built terribly.

00:05:07.280 | It's gonna take a long time.

00:05:08.160 | So it's time to start pushing back against the unrestricted allocation of work.

00:05:13.360 | Mr. S, if your boss wants you to spend 50/50,

00:05:16.000 | make him tell you what that 50/50 is, make him live by that decision.

00:05:19.920 | They're now hours he cannot get you to do work for team A because it's team B hours, etc.

00:05:24.800 | And if he wants to put another thing on your plate,

00:05:26.720 | where are those hours coming from?

00:05:27.840 | It's time to get explicit.

00:05:29.120 | Don't just push stuff on my plate.

00:05:30.480 | I'll pull in what I actually have time for.

00:05:33.360 | And what we don't have time for is more questions about deep work.

00:05:38.480 | So let's move on now to some questions about the deep life.

00:05:42.080 | [MUSIC]

What Do You Do When Your Boss Allocates You to a Team Half-Time?

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