On Busyness

I have been busy at work. Right now I have twelve people on my team. I meet with them for at least 30 minutes every week which requires preparation and organization time reviewing what they’ve done in the previous week. That means I spend an entire work day talking to or thinking about my direct reports. Plus an hours a week we meeting as a QA group to talk about stuff going in the division

         9 hours counted.

I also oversee 4 applications - 5 if you count one that isn’t in active development besides bug fixes. Each of these applications has designated developers and QAers and they meet every other week to discuss project status, designs, current problems. For 1 application, I own and run that meeting. Now, I do not always attend the other application meetings but that accounts for another 2 -4 hours in a week.

       13 hours counted.

As a manager, I have management meetings where we discuss division level problems, projects, customer escalations. We also meet as a review board to discuss all of the fixes customers request for our applications. Almost everyone one of our contracted customers uses at least two of the applications I oversee - when you buy our clinical applications, the fees include licensing for my applications - so we have requests coming from over 250+ possible organizations. These meetings take about 4-5 hours a week with additional reparation time included.

       18 hours counted.

Additional QA management meetings, meeting with my manager take about another hour., and regular review and assignment of designs and incoming development I’m also the owner for one Company Wide Efforts, one internal process shift project, and portions of regulatory policy development where I regularly get calls from all over the company to help them explain how the functionality works.

       22 hours counted. (1)

Any way you look at it it, it’s hard to say I’m not being employed - be always employ’d.

My typical week has all the markings of industry. Tasks abound, urgent issues that only I can address, my team needs me, the phone rings (2). This is how you work, right? This is being important.

Behind that mask of always employ’d”, through the haze of email and meetings and phone calls, lurks the question: was my time spent doing quality things?

The full quote Franklin used to describe his virtue of industry is this:

“Be always employ’d in something useful.”

In something useful. There in lies our dilemma - when you lose half of your day to required meetings, urgent interruptions, managerial debacles, how do you know when what you’re doing is useful and not just being busy?

I question, then, if I am being industrious or just busy with my work week as previously described. I certainly and thoroughly enjoy working directly with my team but am I using those 22 prescribed hours well?

Unmasking Busy

Busyness is the specter of engagement. It wears the mask of importance and gives you that same rush you used to get being fully engaged in a task from shallow activities packed into your day.

This description from Rands in Repose describes the sensation well:

“Monday morning. I roll over to my nightstand and grab my iPad. Has anything blown up in the last six hours? No texts and no urgent emails. A quick scan of news sites shows me what the planet currently cares about and then I head into my cave after making a pot of coffee. Another deeper email scan to deal with the first round of mails that need attention followed by a glance at my calendar — the day is full. Nine meetings, blocked out for lunch, currently done at 6pm. Another quick scan of the planet and I’m in the car.”

Usefulness is different. Usefulness is engagement in your tasks that bring out your (or other’s if you’re a manager) greater good.

Industriousness is blending these two things.

Once unmasked.

This idea applies outside of just work or jobs and it is what Franklin was really trying to get at. It’s not that one should spend every waking hour working (3) but should being doing things that satisfy you or help you to be a happier person

Example: I believe regular exercise is an act of industry. When I am exercising, especially intervals and weights I have discovered, I am much calmer and more engaged in my life. I think clearer, sleep better, and even enjoy doing little things a little better (4).

Alternate: reading books is an act of industry. Reading expands your thoughts, engages your imagination, increases your vocabulary, and generally allows you to divert anxiety or stress from the day to give your self a chance to recuperate.

Counter examples: Social Media bouncing, TV, Desert Golf (5)

These things are hardly bad. I would consider Facebook or Twitter or what have you to be acts on industry when they help us free our minds from something stressful. I check Twitter when I’ve been hitting my head against a problem for a while with no progress and need to force myself to work on something else. It’s operational backgrounding for a problem. I’m not going to immediately solve it but need it out of my ind so I can move on to other things.

It’s just doing things like reading or responding on Facebook interrupting the task where it becomes problematic. trying to return to the same, previous task between status updates derails your mind - it is disruption instead of diversion.

Applied industry

Franklin may have meant Industriousness as a means to avoid debt and bring personal wealth but it’s the avenue to a more complete person. Working for work’s sake is as debilitating as debt, as unhealthy as regular drunkenness.

Busy + Useful is where you find achievement in anything you do. It’s the engaging sort of task be it for your job, your hobby, or your health.

So I consider - am I spending those 22 hours well? On occasion, yes. When I am taking the time to review my team’s accomplishments, what each person has done in the week, understanding how they apply themselves, and recognize that for our weekly meetings, yes - I am absolutely using that time well.

When I am disengaged, running from meeting to meeting, answering emails on my phone while trying not to run into people in the hallways, no - that is not using my time well. This is shallow engagement, the quick high of putting out fires or responding to questions that distracts me into believe i’m accomplishing something (6).

The key here is understanding how to ensure that what I’m putting in the remaining hours, what promises I’m making, are getting my full attention but still allowing me to fully attend those committed hours.

That’s really the secrete, right?

From the 1738 (7) edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac:

Drive thy business; let not that drive thee.

Work you time. Don’t let it work you.

1. This is, realistically, 50% of my average week - over the ten years of my career, I average about 44-46 hours a week. I’ve only recently started regularly pulling 50 hours.↩︎

2. Good god I hate phones….↩︎

3. Unless working your job is what really drives you, satisfies you, makes you happy. Just don’t forget that moderation is a virtue too. ↩︎

4. Like cleaning dishes. Crazy, right?↩︎

5. It’s never just one more hole…. ↩︎

6. I’m not saying meetings are useless. I’m saying my time is useless in them when I am unprepared or distracted. It is up to me to make that time good time. ↩︎

7. He also published that aphorism in the 1744 edition. Something are always true. And good page fillers. ↩︎

Time Is Money Is

In all my reading in Industriousness and work ethics the last few days and weeks, I found the Time is Money origin.  It seems that pretty much every phrase you’ve ever heard before, Franklin wrote it first. 

From a Advice to a Young Tradesman:

“Remember that Time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.” - Ben Franklin

Or more modernly…

“Time is money, money is power, power is pizza, and pizza is knowledge, let’s go!” - April Ludgate, Parks & Rec

Time Is Money Is

In all my reading in Industriousness and work ethics the last few days and weeks, I found the Time is Money origin.  It seems that pretty much every phrase you’ve ever heard before, Franklin wrote it first. 

From a Advice to a Young Tradesman:

“Remember that Time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.” - Ben Franklin

Or more modernly…

“Time is money, money is power, power is pizza, and pizza is knowledge, let’s go!” - April Ludgate, Parks & Rec

Updated list of Virtues

I updated my List of Virtues with the last three weeks of edicts. This list is getting pretty long and its good to review them on occasion.

I am curious what I’ll think of it on the other end when a list of 13 virtues has 2-3 “rules” for each.

Industry

Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

The modern equivalent to Franklin’s virtue of Industry is “productivity,” which I mean here differently than in previous discussions regarding Order. Productivity is the acting of that organization - doing. The “getting” of GTD.

The ideas align in the “always be employ’d” part of the virtue above. Franklin was forever doing stuff(1) like inventing, researching, reading, or walking down the street with barrows-full of paper to look as productive as possible(2). Work in colonial America had two-fold purpose.

1. It kept you free(er) from debt.

Many of America, colonists were debtors trying to start a new life if not run from their fiduciary responsibilities and avoid debtor’s prisons. Georgia, founded by James Oglethorp in 1732, was first populated mostly by English debtors in an attempt to reduce prison populations in England and offer safe haven to those seeking a fresh start.

2. It brought you salvation.

Puritans took an extreme interpretation of the Catholic idea of “good works.” The harder working a person, the better they were and the more likely to be one of the chosen (3) for heaven.

Franklin was more focused in reducing debt. In laying out his plan for moral perfection, he said this about industry,

“Frugality and Industry freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing affluence and independence, would make more easy the practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc., etc”

No one is truly good and free without hard work and diligence nor able to afford for themselves a proper life if that life is spent working off debt to others. That’s his idea. The interesting thing to me is not that Franklin believed in work as its own reward (4) but as means to more useful ends. The harder you worked, the more likely you achieve autonomy to pursue your own desires and that was the ultimate in morality - a person being their best self.

While I am curious how work and pay functioned in colonial America where most of work was to produce things for sale and not based on salary, reducing frivolous time can be beneficial. An excess of time spent doing unhelpful things, like reading Facebook or fighting Twitter trolls, diminishes one’s effectiveness doing a job and ultimately has a negative effect on one’s mental health. Doing useful things keeps us sane.

As with anything, however, an excess of working can be just as bad. So, I take Industry to mean this:

1. Be engaged in what you’re doing.
2. Reduce wasteful time beyond what refreshes and relaxes you.

If we assume that our organization of a day from previous adherence to Order, staying, 1, engaged in the things we plan ensures that what we do gets done well and that we, 2, properly plan time to relax with appropriate amounts of diversion. But the getting of things done is not our exclusive purpose or need in life. We are not mindless productivity drones. Personally, I like my job (5) but do not want to spend all of my time doing it. I also like reading what people are doing on Facebook; it is comforting. But losing an hour to it amidst a work day ultimately increases stress where I’m not meeting promises made about my workday.

In short, really: Too much of work or diversion makes Jack a dull boy.

1. Including embellishing his industriousness in his autobiography.↩︎

2. “I sometimes brought home the paper I purchas’d at the stores thro’ the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteem’d an industrious, thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom”↩︎

3. Puritans were Calvinists and believed that one was predestined for heaven irrespective of deed but that one who was predestined would show it by doing good things in their lives.↩︎

4. Raised Puritan, he likely was accustomed to work as its own reward though I think that idea is bunk given 3 above. People worked because they thought that was demonstrating their likelihood of salvation.↩︎

5. Job_s_ if you count Bunny Rope.↩︎

Frugality

Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i. e., waste nothing.

How do you define good when you’re talking about spending money? Is it good to buy dinner when you’ve spent most of the evening out of the house, running errands? How bad is buying a cup of coffee at a coffee shop when you write that thing you’ve been stuck on? Do you need another book?

I firmly believe that the core of frugality is not “be cheap” but “by useful things that will last.” Buying the cheapest toaster does you little good if it breaks a month after you get it. But buying the best toaster makes little sense if you make toast once in a blue moon.

You have to balance cost with longevity and use. The best example I have is my satchel (1). I bought it in 2009 for about $350. I carry that thing with me every day. It gets bumped against things, falls off desks, gets rolled over by chairs. All I need to do to keep it in good shape is rub it down with leather conditioner every six months or so. I love that bag and will probably have it for many, many years longer. Even over the life of the bag to this date, it’s cost me about 21¢ a day (2).

Obviously the amount I use my satchel suggests the amount of money that makes sense to put into it. You can think similarly about cars, snow shovels, cell phones.

In short, frugality is not about being cheap. It’s about reducing unnecessary expenditure. Franklin was pretty keen on frugality as a way to wealth (5) and much of what he wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanack was advice on saving money. Two of his proverbs in particular resonate with me:

Beware of little expenses; A small Leak will sink a great Ship;

For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the Enemy; all for the want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail

Small expenses add up but not making the right expenditures can be devestating. This is what I’ll keep in mind this week. Balancing expenses with need is important. Honestly, I have no problem spending the day at a coffee shop when the atmosphere helps me write or research. But getting coffee because I’m too lazy to make it myself is problematic.

Edicts for Frugality:

1. Define the need for each little expense - is the benefit greater than the expense?
2. Before you buy something, consider existing tools to accomplish the task. If this one offers no benefit, in time or ease of use, is it worth it?
3. Save first.

So - take care with little expense, especially consumables like coffee or dinners. They aren’t necessarily bad but understand why you’re making them. Which is as applicable when buying durable goods; ask if you have something now that would work and, if the benefit in time saved or ease of use doesn’t match up, don’t buy it.

And save first - figure out how to save more as early in the saving process (more on this later).

1. This was actually the second leather bag (3) I bought, the first being the briefcase from the same people at Saddleback Leather.↩︎

2. I’ve spend about $50 on leather care products. So 50+350 / 1911 days since I bought it on 11/1/2009 is 20.9¢ a day. ↩︎

3. The big leather briefcase, which I still use as a gym bag nearly every day, rigger bag every month, and travel suitcase every few months, was about $650. I bought it a year before (4) comes to 28¢ a day.↩︎

4. I used to take pictures of everything and it’s becoming a great reference for my life. Searching for “leather” on my flickr stream is really nice.↩︎

5. Primarily “by the practice of industry and frugality, free from debt, which exposes a man to confinement, and a species of slavery to his creditors.”↩︎