Seven Levels of Busy
randsinrepose.com
randsinrepose.com
The common through line is how much stuff is getting dropped, and how much control do you have on what work you take on.
There are some context dependent things that tells me this is written from the perspective of someone who works in an office, such as “Work hours spill into life hours.” and “It is clear by how I walk how busy I am.”
There are some undefined aspects, for example, I’m at level 2 when I have tasks that “are reasonable, knowable, and not deadline-based.” What level am I at when I have at-least one deadline based task. If I’m on a scrum team, and everything needs to be done by the end of the sprint, does level 1 & 2 not exist and everyone starts at level 3?
I would love to be able to point to something like this. I see three books on this authors website, if it’s in any of these books I’d like to ask people in my office “have you read x? There’s an idea in there about y that I think you’d be interested in.”
7 Habits is a classic self-help book that would accomplish some of this. Although, it approaches the problem of business indirectly with concepts like degree of control vs. degree of concern. It also suggests principles that an overly busy person cannot follow, but never connects the dots by explicitly saying "you're too busy."
Another one to look at comes from R&D management: Principles of Product Development Flow. The first couple chapters, especially, explain the problems of trying to maintain a full schedule (queueing theory.) I would probably make a resource based on the book rather than just handing someone a copy, unless you know they'd not be intimidated by it. https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-G...
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns --
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load."
--- Robert Frost
My friends have a few, but I'm not terribly interested in science-fiction (further narrowing the pool I imagine). I'm not limiting myself to book clubs full of programmers, but I suppose it'd be nice to discuss tech-adjacent books, e.g. Bostrom.
Like any system, you need enough slack. That slack makes you resilient over the long term. It gives you what you value in life. Autonomy, relatedness, and competence to whatever you set your goals towards.
I hate the mentality of "if it's not in a calendar, it's not happening" because this is the opposite of slack. There's a beauty in serendipity when it comes to not being busy. It opens more doors than closes them in my experience.
I would argue that the optimal level is negative in that you're not "busy" by the definition, but you are tackling your top goal until it is accomplished and then to the next one. You won't even make a dent in it if you're constantly distracted by small immediate things. You have to learn to set boundaries and say no. It's the only way things actually get done.
There are jobs where you can get hired and almost immediately be at the higher levels of busy as described here, and it’s not really easy to get an entire culture or organization to quickly buy into a new philosophy.
People have paid the price in health and happiness for surviving in these situations. Whether they could be handled in a better way or not, I don’t see how it makes any sense to call their business a myth.
I'm arguing for the individual to buy into a new philosophy. One of not being busy. Modern busyness is a construct we accept out of fear. Fear of getting fired, fear of missing out, fear of being passed over for a promotion.
Most of the things we think we need to do, we don't need to do at all. Constant context switching and divided focus is not a thing humans do well at. I think we've misunderstood the power of mono-tasking.
There's a great paradox in it all. The less busy we are, the more we can accomplish. Maybe others have noticed similar phenomena.
I have been the top level of busy before, where I have work day full of meetings, and then a work day of actual work after all the meetings.
Looking at the levels of busyness the concept of requiring slack is still compatible for me. If I am at low levels of busyness (< 4) there should be capacity for planned slots of slack, where goals can be worked on with own pace, ad-hoc meetings and guidance from peers (to fulfil the SDT motivational needs).
Analog (some) can chase their tail and consider that busy while innovation is onto the next goal.
A. Levels 1 and 2. I ship stuff when it's as excellent and finished as I can possibly make it.
B. Levels 3 and 4. I'm too busy to get every last detail tidied up, but when I ship stuff, it's 90% of what I wanted it to be. I don't always nail the deadline 100%, but on both quality and timeliness, I'm respected and seen as someone who doesn't let the team down. I secretly like peeling away when it's almost done, because there's usually something more valuable and exciting coming next.
C. Level 5. I'm very erratic. On a few key projects, I'm still shipping in a pretty dependable way. But the amount of half-done stuff in my mental attic is scary. I've still got the willpower and credibility every now and then to offload/kill the most hopeless projects, and that gives me a bit of a reprieve.
D. Levels 6 and 7. I don't have a coherent approach to shipping. Incomplete work leaves my control when someone else seizes it from me. There's a ton of stuff that's half-done that I may never have time to revisit. I'm too tired to sort out anything -- or put up a fight.
When I'm building something for myself, I'm almost always at Level 2. At Level 1, I never finish anything. At Levels 3 and above, I never seem to find the time to dig deep enough to build it good enough.
I honestly believe that the greatest stuff can get built at Level 2, which I've always thought of as the "Baby Bear Level", not too hot, not too cold, just right.
I don't think I've ever allowed myself to get above Level 4. My father and all my uncles seemed to be around Level 6 or Level 7 their whole lives at work to make a couple more bucks. They all worked themselves to death. I vowed I would never do that. Sure, I could have done more and earned more, but I kept my promise to myself.
I'm taking a little break for this HN visit, but the results of what I was working on before look good and I'm excited to move on. No immediate deadline. Loose schedule. Going to have a ball getting 5 or 6 things done today. For me, this is the only way to work.
Overall, this sounds like it was posted by a person with an over-active sense of responsibility, which I can relate to all too well...
From the text I think he draws a distinction between consciously deciding not to do something and missing it entirely.
Level 5 allows consciously dropping — saying “I’m sorry [can’t do it] a lot”
Level 6 - you aren’t seeing everything and they are getting dropped WITHOUT intent. “Just saying “No” to inbound things is not enough.”
As an aside, guidelines violating clickbait number title? “The Seven Levels of Busy”
At many workplaces, it's totally OK to drop things deliberately. I've been told by managers that [Company] deliberately loads you with more than you can do and expects you to make the right judgment calls. It's even sometimes OK to drop them by accident as long as you know they are being dropped and communicate the droppage after the fact. When you start dropping things and don't even know you're dropping them, that's usually where it starts becoming a problem for the organization and where it starts coming up in performance reviews.
It's a rare privilege to be able to rebalance your own workload like that. As a consultant, I have some ability to do this, but if I accomplish one focused task that takes an hour one day, I only get paid for one hour that day. I cannot make myself less busy without literally lowering my pay.
If I was an hourly contractor, I'd be billing for those extra hours in the hopes that I could cover myself after a crash. But I'm not sure that contract research is a thing. And... have you considered billing by the day? I've never been a contractor but I've heard it's a thing.
But... it's not like I have a choice in the matter. I've forced myself to work through burnout for literally years at a time, and now that part of me is broken forever. That's what "unsustainable" means. I will eventually quit tech, or move on to management, when the time comes.
If you cannot find slack and your busyness is frequently hitting 5-7, breakdowns will occur. If you can't recover without going broke, you haven't found a sustainable balance. Again, not a contractor, but the advice I've heard from contractors is to charge more.
Maybe I need to get out. I can't charge more: I'm salaried in a giant corporation full of consultants. They literally have a "quota" for how much they can give out in raises each year, despite the fact that me earning more means they also earn more (via the multiplier). Doesn't matter, it's heresy to give employees high raises.
Except I'm not really salaried, because I only get paid what I bill. And I can't bill for downtime, because that's fraud. So I really have the worst of all worlds. Going for a 30 minute walk to clear my head means 30 minutes of less pay, even though my employer benefits from that. For tax, overtime, and labor law purposes, I'm salaried and exempt (to the benefit of my employer), but for my actual paycheck, I'm hourly (to the benefit of my employer).
Frankly I doubt the practice would be legal in any country with reasonable fair labor laws. Unfortunately, I live in the U.S.
Still, it's better than working in some code mill where they burn you for 60 or 70 hours per week and pay you for 40.
I was young when the dot-com bubble popped. I weathered that by going back to school and working part time. From there I developed some in-demand skills that make my work rewarding. My student loans are nearly paid off and my horizon looks alright for a couple of years. We'll see how this recession goes; I'm always on the lookout for a viable exit strategy and that's gotten quite dim lately.
The post neglects to mention at which Level one would start saying "No." And I argue it should be Level 3, to avoid going to Level 4.
If I found myself in Level 5, 6, or 7 the only explanation I would find is that I've very badly mismanaged my time for too long.
There was a time when I was completely overworked. A short project, but it was devastating. It was stressful for everyone involved, but mostly so for me and a colleague of mine. I was in my early thirties and she in her early sixties. We worked day and night, taking taxis to and from work, to get home, for 4 hours of sleep. She came out of the period unscathed, no problem at all while I developed claustrophobia, insomnia, paranoia and depression.
Those went away, after some time, within a year or so. But I, to this day, think that I dodged a bullet. It could’ve gone so much worse.
One big learning, or realisation, that I had, from that experience, was that taking one of those self tests, showed all the signs of being over worked and stressed. But. I didn’t feel stressed. That was the killer. I didn’t feel stressed, and so I kept going thinking ‘I guess those tests/signs apparently don’t apply to me’.
Never again.
When my wife or I go down with illness or injury ourselves, it immediately goes to Level 6 or 7 for the remaining parent.
Scrum only has the part when you get your head down and code. Finished it? Good, let's see what is the next task, get our heads down and code again. "Sprint" is a very apt name.
(Of course, that is because the activities that actually bring product quality got somebody specialized on them. You can't find a best portrait of the Western management culture looking at management, disenfranchise the workers that actually know how to do things, bring somebody with no skin on the game and plenty of conflicting interests to make all the decisions.)
My scrum trainer said, with full conviction, "I've never seen a retrospective done well that took less than four hours."
Nobody does Scrum. Everybody just does the part where you have a defined list of tasks for a sprint and burn it down until you get close enough to zero before the next sprint starts. It's called "scrum-but."
Working at the shout of other people tends to damage you and the company in the long term (If you are building things and have to maintain them).
I understand that not everyone is a developer and this example does not fit every role. Likewise, an "agile" way of working should not be used for every job.
Rapidly-changing diaries are problematic already at much lower levels than "business level 7"... they also interfere with your own ability to plan your day.
Work only on the first item on the list until it's done.
How's it going?
So busy.
When you have that conversation the level they are refering to is Level 0.
I didn't read any of his books, but heard him on Sam Harris' podcast/app and found his take interesting and stimulating reflection about my own behaviors. Certainly worth looking up, if you believe you might be affected by similar phenomenon.
The only interesting question is "I'm perpetually at one of the last two or three stages, how do I go down the scale ?"
(Ironically, reading HN is one of the things _not_ to do.)
What's beyond that? Eldritch horrors?
I encourage use of "asynchronous" communication like txt and email and letting calls go to voicemail. Key item is to actually follow up on those things several times a day.
I've taken to coming in at 6AM and getting things done before the 8AM flood hits. Second flood happens during lunch. Not much during the end of the day so generally off at 4 which is nice.
Don’t cut it. Ask if it’s urgent. If not, say you can come to it in X amount of time. If the person is junior or insisting, tell them the laundry list of questions you will have to get context. And ask if they did all that research already.
It has the double nice effect of motivating people to diagnose their stuff better. And usually once you are free, the stuff is solved.
I tend to avoid tech lead position now but I hold many and it went well. Setting boundaries works !
This is the situation where you escalate to their boss. If you don't have the clout, have your boss or your skip-levels escalate.
Don't accommodate bad behavior by others. Get email documentation so when they cause your things to break you have leverage.
Fortune 500s operate this way. CxOs like the crab-in-a-bucket approach because they get to be heroes and build their empires on the corpses of failed departments they take over. Tell them exactly what you need of them and why things are breaking and they are all too happy to assist since this aligns to their incentives. If they fail to help, your department is the one that will soon be the corpse, and you can freshen the resume.
(Note: I personally hate those kinds of organizational dynamics, but its one thing to find them distasteful but useful and another to deny their existence).
Who says it’s bad behavior? Maybe they’re at capacity and their manager told them to deprioritize requests coming from outside the team. Maybe the OP’s requests are unreasonable or better handled by someone else.
Not enough information here to make a determination one way or the other. One thing is for sure, people need to stop viewing colleagues as their servants. Most people want to be helpful, if someone doesn’t help you when you ask for help, there is usually a reason.
Roadblocker's intent to do good is immaterial -- their actions and tactics are resulting in poor outcomes for those that are required to partner with them.
They intentionally don't fix their "broken" deployment environment so someone else has to do anything CI/CD related. It's infuriating because their attitude reads as anything is beneath them, and they have no respect for others' time.
Ignoring junior people has its own risks. You generally have to follow up and ensure they did the research, by asking questions, which takes up time. Most of the time as a team lead you'll be there for training and guidance to ensure your Jr team members get beyond that position.
Honestly it just sounds the parent poster is given too much to do which will always lead to stuff getting dropped, something ignored, or overwork on someones part.
Everyone needs to be at the same level of organization and agree upon what topics are and aren't relevant for each meeting. This is the flip side of work from home culture. You have to have your shit together. No excuses.
us mortals of meddling ability and position need to compromise
EDIT: IF I WASNT CLEAR - the "best person you know" should be by your own individual standards. <3
edit 2 - im still compromising every single day