Mike Tarullo is SVP of Corporate Development at Venture for America. Mike has run and managed nearly every department at VFA and most recently has focused his efforts on helping Fellows build companies via our seed fund, the VFA Accelerator and Innovation Fund.
Read on for his advice on prioritizing and productivity and follow his thoughts on jobs, learning and startups on his blog “Outside the Echo Chamber“.
We’ve all been told that there are seven habits of highly effective people. That billionaires get up early. People ask how Elon Musk worked 100+ hours a week his whole career and assume this is desirable and imitable. Mark Suster describes his stress and health struggles in a really personal, revealing post, and then in a post 6 months later suggests entrepreneurs should be working past 10pm and on nights & weekends or they’ve basically given up. We’ve even been criticized en masse for feeling overwhelmed when it turns out we aren’t actually that busy.
Multitasking is doing us no favors. It makes us feel busy when we’re not. It is correlated with having a smaller brain. I am reminded several times a week (via a colleague’s eye-roll) that I can’t process what someone’s saying to me if I am also looking at a screen. Granted, males are worse at this than females, but none of us are especially good at juggling our burdens in a healthy way.
This is not news – we are somewhere between overworked, under-attentive, procrastinating, exhausted, and poorly prioritized. Take my present situation:
I have 15 tabs open on my laptop, 34 more on my phone, seven documents across Excel, Word, and PPT, Spotify playing, and a baseball game I turned on in the background.
This is while I’m trying to write. A post about prioritizing.
I don’t like baseball.
I know how bad I am at multitasking. When I told someone I was writing a post about my strategy for not multitasking she said, “you mean, just ignoring people?” Meanwhile, probably someone is reading this and scoffing and being like “lol only 15 tabs?! Get at me when you have sixty,” and being strangely proud of themselves. In conclusion, I am not going to cure your multitasking disease.
Do not lose hope! There are still some cheat codes and extra lives to be had. You may have as many tabs and screens as your heart desires, and I won’t try to stop you. You will have more productive days, and less productive days, and having a few of one or the other in a row doesn’t change your value as a human being. Nor does working a 70 hour week when 50 would do fine make you a better person.
The best thing most of us can do is to aggressively do fewer things. Those who attempt to boil the ocean fail. Be strategic with your time.
I’ve taken to limiting the number of things I try to do. By focusing on a smaller number of things, I do them each better, and end up with extra mental energy to invest in big picture thinking. I also reduce decision fatigue, which keeps me from making as many bad calls or having frequent lapses in judgment.
I’m trying to not make too aggressive an effort at this – I don’t want to punish myself if something comes up, and I don’t think drastic behavioral changes work too well or last too long. There are no shortcuts, but I feel like the positive feedback loop from being focused is making it possible to be more balanced and not feel overwhelmed.
To wit, I’ll share what I’m focused on now:
Work Life
The ocean boilers always appear overworked and super productive on the outside, but I was never sure what they’re doing. Until I saw the “Eisenhower Box” above (Dwight says, “What is urgent is seldom important and what is important is seldom urgent“). They are doing “not important” constantly. I have known many of these people. You have, too. If you don’t know what I mean, you are one of them, and you should close your eyes and take ten slow, calm breaths. Then, decide on one goal for the remainder of the day and ignore everything else until you accomplish it. Spend every possible minute in the important but not urgent bucket. You will naturally get pulled into the urgent bucket and do not need to prioritize it.
I try to get down to three or so areas of focus per week. One is a project I’m point on, one is my team’s most important project, and the final is a working relationship I need to improve. Each day, if I make significant progress on one of these important items, the day is a success.
The most common mistake is assuming things are urgent or important that are not. If everything is important, nothing is. If everything is urgent, you’re set up to fail and need to rethink.
My best exercise for this is to write all of your responsibilities and projects on post it notes, then move them into the four quadrants above. Do it with someone else (a manager?) to help you prioritize, so they’re aware of your workload. The two hardest things: pushing things that are urgent into unimportant, and pushing things that are important into a reasonable order of priority. Do not be upset when you come to a manageable plan – some people love that feeling of being busy or overwhelmed, but I promise everyone else will love you more when you have a manageable amount of stuff to do and it’s turning out great.
Social Life
Prioritize the people who matter most (important, but not urgent). Each week, pick two people whom you really like, and schedule something to do with each of them. If you have a significant other, they should permanently be one of those people. Watching TV with someone doesn’t count as a scheduled activity.
Second, I’m sure you have a big acquaintance circle, because only popular people read my blog. You’ll find you can comfortably see these friends pretty damn frequently at meaningful social functions (birthdays, weddings, concerts, etc.), of which there will probably be at least one a week. This applies to people 22-35 with no kids – beyond that I can’t speak to. Do not succumb to the pressure to do network-y things or show up at every routine gathering where no one will remember if you were there in three months. This will ensure that you’re balancing social life, self, and side projects, which is very tenuous and in my experience gets taken over most often by social life.
Self
This includes exercise, eating, sleeping, etc. I’m not great at this one, so no promises about these strategies. I do avoid setting goals like “go to the gym 4x and run 20 miles a week” because I would eventually (immediately?) fall behind and then be demotivated and stressed.
My current modus operandi is to try to work on good long term habits such as “cook more of your dinners,” and “play a sport occasionally so you remember why you’re bothering to be in shape.” These items also count as hobbies, and thus form a useful psychological defense when confronted with an aggressive overachiever who tries to intimidate me with a laundry list of hobbies like they’re reading a resume.
Side Projects
Pick one. Just one. Do it until you want to do a different one more. For my part, I’m writing more frequently – every day or two. Sometimes I’d prefer to watch a game instead of trying to be a better person (just, you know, not a baseball game), and that’s ok too.
I’m ignoring other side projects until one of them becomes too compelling to ignore and replaces writing. I chose writing because it’s good for me professionally, I can get to real milestones quickly (like hitting publish), and most importantly because it’s a great feeling to be able to produce something and share it – which is key because my job presents few opportunities for that. I told a couple of people I was working on this, and now they reinforce (hassle) me every few days about it, which is the perfect level of reminder. It is incredibly non-urgent and feels important to me, although I guess the measure of that is how many people actually make it to this point in the blog post.
You shouldn’t have to try too hard to do all of this stuff – I find things should feel important and not urgent if you’re picking the right/most natural priorities. The trick is to take the painful step of not doing certain things that someone else asks you to do, or that you’re used to doing. You’ve got to take a step back and stop thinking that being overwhelmed means you’re awesome. Sometimes people who do too many things are simply searching for something worth investing in that they haven’t found.
Maybe someday I’ll close those tabs. For now, just going to try to keep focused on the few that matter.