Accidentally in Code

Tag: delegating

  • Delegation – What Value Do You Place on Time?

    The Passage of Time
    Credit: flickr / ToniVC

    My friends and some of my colleagues have been mocking me for “outsourcing my life”. I don’t think that expression is accurate though – it’s more that I’ve been outsourcing details in order to enjoy life more (and achieve more). For me, it’s all about leverage. How can I leverage myself in order to do more?

    Relinquishing Control

    My dad is a wonderful person and I love him so much, but he has a terrible problem delegating. He takes on too much and agrees to do things that he should have someone else take care of, and it drives my mom crazy. I worry that I have a tendency to do this too, so I’ve been forcing myself to give stuff away to other people. I tell myself that even if I don’t think they will do as good a job as I would, at least I don’t have to do it – in the worst case, I just have to fix it and that will take less time than actually doing – because starting is the thing that takes most time. But it turns out, I rarely have to fix things I delegate.

    Sometimes it’s easy. If you’ve been shopping and taken advice on what to buy from your friends, a personal shopper is not a great leap (I did this when I had only a couple of days to get the right clothes to wear for my internship in the UK between 3rd and 4th year). If you do group exercise classes, a personal trainer is not so bizarre (I’ve been training with one in order to recover from my recent injuries). Outsourcing my resume was harder, but I had to acknowledge that it did not work to my strengths and so Maureen McCann of MyPromotion wrote it and she did a much better job.

    Now, I’m outsourcing details. I have a PA for a couple of hours a week and she’s mostly been taking care of insurance stuff and scheduling things. It’s great, because I gave her a stack of insurance nonsense and she’s taken care of it (if I was going to, it would have happened sometime in the last 6 months that it’s been on my desk). Also, for scheduling something often I don’t really care when it is, as long as it fits within the current commitments I have. She can pick Monday at 5, and that’s fine. If I have to decide, I’ll end up agonizing about the difference between Monday at 5 and Tuesday at 5. The truth is, there probably isn’t that much of one.

    Working to Your Strengths

    My teammate and I were talking about being detail oriented – and I am, in terms of programming. One of my friends gave me a little trick the other day, why would you do:

    if (myString.equals("something")) { myString = "something"; }

    (clue, it involves immutability). I find that fascinating – I just don’t find details elsewhere that interesting. In fact, I find them draining.

    Technically, my PA knows a little bit of programming (I would know, I taught her most of it). But if I have a script to write, it would be useless to delegate it to her when I can do it, and have it working in a fraction of the time it would take her to even get started. I could delegate some research stuff, but again – it would probably take her much longer. What I’m finding, though, is the things I give her to do are the things that take me a really long time and make me stressed and/or miserable, and she gets them done really quickly. This means I can get on with the tasks that give me energy, rather than drain it.

    Whilst my resume was being written, I read Effective Java (Amazon). Now which is really the more productive thing to do? By doing my own resume, I save some amount of money. By reading Effective Java, I develop my expertise in my field (it is an amazing book) – to me, it’s obvious that is a better use of my time. As a bonus, I have a better resume for it.

    Two weeks ago, I was in the wilderness. Last week, I gave a talk. This week, I have a terrifying job interview. All this is on top of my internship. Could I cope without a PA? Yes. But I would be more stressed out and have less time to devote to the things that matter most to me.

    Putting a Value on Your Time

    It seems like people sometimes think it’s arrogant to suggest that your time is worth more than someone elses. But – we all place value on our time. If you’ve ever opted to pay more for the direct flight rather than the one with multiple connections, you placed a value on time, and perhaps the stress of trying to make connections. It literally had a $ value. At work, my time is worth a fraction of that of a Distinguished Engineer. So we’re going to meet on his or her schedule, not mine. When working, we exchange time for money. So our time has a monetary value, and it varies person to person.

    When I was TAing, students would sometimes send me all their code with a description of the problem that basically amounted to “it’s not working”. As a result of this, we had a chat about “iPhone optimizing” their emails. Initially, all I want is the error message. After that, I will accept the small section of code that is the problem. If we still have a problem, it’s most likely a design issue, and I expect them to come in person to see me. Yes, I can compile and run their code, but I would maintain that is not a good use of my time, and is not educational to them. By teaching them to respect my time, I’m also teaching them to debug better. And hopefully disabusing them of the notion that I’m a compiler, which, worryingly, I had to tell more than one of them.

    Why is that relevant? Because all the time we make judgments as to whose time is worth more. We just express it in a different way.

    Delegating Details, Not Responsibility

    I’ve been embroiled in a disagreement with Goodlife, because I want to work out with a trainer once a week just to make sure that I’m realigning myself (I dislocated my right knee, right shoulder, twisted my right ankle, and messed up my right hip – bit of a disaster zone) and I don’t want to commit to 9 months of 3 times a week, which seems to be their (utterly ridiculous) minimum. So I negotiated, or rather, I convinced my trainer who then negotiated with her manager. And then they backed down a little, to 2x a week for 6 months and they would sell any that I had over. I explained that I would be gone for about 2 months out of the next 6 and countered with 2x a week for 4 months and this was refused because they “couldn’t guarantee results” with that many sessions.

    This really frustrated me, because I don’t want to delegate the responsibility for me to get back into shape after this many injuries. I just want to delegate the details of what exactly I should be doing to rehabilitate. I also see PT as a complement to the other exercise I do (kickboxing, swimming, rollerblading, body pump, yoga, cardio…) rather as the exercise I do.

    Likewise with my PA, I don’t tell her “plan my life after graduation and decide where I should apply for jobs”, I give her concrete tasks like, “please deal with this pile of insurance stuff as per this form”, and “I have to be in location X for an interview on date Y at Z time for a duration of i minutes – please work out how and when I’m going to get there and where I’m going to stay”.

    Things We Don’t Do

    In North America, it’s normal to have an automatic car. This makes sense to me, because the car does a better job of changing gear than most people do. For the most part, we don’t cut our own hair (if we have any sense – this applies to dramatic eyebrow reshaping too), grow our own food, or produce our own electricity. It’s not productive to implement our own source control systems, or test runners. We don’t create our own crawl of the web, we Google.

    Obviously this can go to far, if we say “I don’t need to know how to entertain myself, I have a TV for that”. But one crucial thing that I get from other people is confidence – I get driven forwards because other people believe in me, even when I doubt myself.

    As part of this minimalism malarkey that I’m not such an aficionado of, I’ve read a number of times “Don’t outsource – if you don’t want to do something, just stop doing it”. I don’t really understand how that works, I mean what if you don’t want to do your taxes? Will that hold with the IRS?

    Delegating does force me to evaluate things though. If I don’t want to give up responsibility, then I actually need to get it done. If I’m going to pay someone else to do it, it should be something that it’s really worth doing.

    It also helps me with saying no, which I’m not great at doing. Someone asked me to do something the other day that I really wanted to say yes to but would have been really difficult and caused a lot of stress. Rather than saying yes and trying to make it work logistically, I just delegated it. But if someone’s asking me to do something and I’m literally going to pay someone else to do it so I don’t have to, it had better be a reasonable and worthwhile request that I really want to accommodate.

    It’s not Minimizing “Work”, it’s about Maximizing “Great”

    I read the book The 4-Hour Workweek (Amazon) and it is a really interesting book that helped me evaluate where I’m spending my time, but I agree with Penelope Trunk – the thrust is not about just “working” 4 hours a week, it’s about making the vast majority of what you do not feel like work (she represented that a little more negatively).

    Another book I read recently is Do More Great Work (Amazon). I was working through the exercises in it, and it was great because I realized that Extreme Blue is all about Great Work.

    The thing about Great Work is that it’s easy to get caught up in Good Work and not get to it. So delegating good work helps me move forward with great work. Managing my email might be good work, but it’s time consuming and rarely as rewarding or useful as a blog post or a piece of code.

    Really, what it comes down to is that there are only a finite number of hours in a day. Delegating is buying a little more time and energy to make a little more progress on the things that matter most to you.

    Time Flies
    Credit: flickr / h.koppdelaney

  • It’s Not a Competition

    rush
    Credit: flickr / Just Add Light

    I read lately that “busy is the new fine“, I bet you’ve seen it too – you ask someone how they are and they say “I’m busy”, or “keeping busy”. I do it too. I hate it, but it takes a long time to change your reaction. I’m trying.

    However more than this, and worse, is this competition to be busiest. I’m busier than you. I must be more organized because I have more on my list. But – are you doing all these things well? I’ve started to notice that people who describe themselves as busy often use it as an excuse to do a half-hearted job at things. If you’re “so busy” that you do such a terrible job that someone has to redo it, why bother? These are the people that I stop bothering to delegate to, because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

    And then I see them and we have the competition as to who’s busiest. It infuriates me – I’m competitive, I want to win – but this is one of those competitions where if you win – you lose. The winner has more commitments, but it’s unlikely they are doing all of them that well. The loser may be picking a couple of things to be extraordinary at.

    How do I get out of this conversation? By not playing this game, people seem to assume I’m not fully occupied and disrespect my time – I definitely don’t want that. My schedule is fairly flexible, so if it’s worth doing I’ll fit it in – but flexible doesn’t mean free.

  • Experimenting with Delegating

    Sacha wrote a lovely post recently about delegating. It’s been sitting open on my computer since, because I need to delegate more if I want to do more – because I’m hitting capacity. I do want to do more, so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what I can delegate and even toying with the thought of a virtual PA (this, of course, was before my scholarship go cut).

    First up, delegating more at WISE. Status: on-going, but making significant progress.

    Now I need a resume. This is an ideal thing for me to delegate, because it’s the kind of thing I hate doing and someone else will do it better. They can focus on the macro level, rather than the micro level where I live day to day.

    I started thinking about this when I read this post from Penelope Trunk.

    “Look, you have to hire someone to help you with your resume. This should not even be a conversation any more. Would you cut your own bangs? If you were in sixth grade, yes, because the only thing you know about bangs in sixth grade is that they hang on your forehead. Once you learn that bangs need to be even, you go to someone who cuts even bangs. When you get older, and you really understand the intricacies of hair, you realize that great bangs are uneven in a highly skilled way, and you don’t even have the right scissors. That’s when you pay a lot of money for someone to “do” your bangs.”

    Honestly, this is a very similar argument that I used to use to explain why I drive an automatic and not a manual (this is actually an argument in the UK, thankfully not in North America).

    Incidentally, I am aware that the university has a careers center where they can help with this kind of thing, but I asked around and they are apparently not that great. OK if you’ve got no clue, but not that helpful if you have a clue and you’re trying to take your CV to the next level.

    So I sat down and thought about what I’m trying to achieve here and I made a list of questions that I asked myself, and my responses to them.

    What do I want to delegate?

    • The resume writing process.
    • Also, feedback on my LinkedIn would be helpful.

    What do I want to achieve?

    • Better resume than I could create myself.
    • Ultimate goal – get a great job.

    What constitutes a good resume?

    • Send it to people I know and respect for feedback.

    What constitutes a great job?

    • Innovating, not reacting.
    • Speaking human and programmer
    • Making a difference, even if small. Don’t necessarily need to change the world (would be nice, though), but want to make applications that improve people’s lives (usability and utility very important).

    Why am I delegating?

    • Time, or lack thereof.
    • Resume writing does not work to my strengths – I prefer to be making stuff than selling myself.

    Finding a Professional Resume Writer

    This was really easy, I sent out a question on Twitter and @AskAroundOttawa sent me a really positive recommendation of Maureen McCann at MyPromotion. So I gave her a call and voila – she even has a student rate, so I’m happy! Now I have some homework, maybe you can help – if you have any insight into the following questions please leave it in the comments or email me, or tell me in person – whatever works for you:

    1. What do employers need to know about me?
    2. What value does my online presence bring?

    I also need to find job descriptions of the kind of jobs I’m looking for. I’ll keep you posted!

  • Delegating

    lolbat
    Credit: flickr / Stevie-B

    As a student, you don’t really learn how to delegate. It’s one of those crucial life skills that doesn’t seem to make it onto the curriculum, and when we think about it – how would it?

    There are opportunities, but you have to go out and find them. Volunteer to team lead on a group project. Join a student organization and take on an exec position.

    The thing is, if you delegate writing some code in a group project to someone who’s a terrible programmer, they let the whole team down. You often have no control over who the people in your group are, let alone whether they are competent. The danger is, first time around, you don’t realize this – you think they know roughly the same things you do. Some might, some won’t, particularly if your program has a lot of flexibility in course choices and supports joint programs. The second time around, you might have learned from this experience but you can’t necessarily change it. You might know that some people aren’t competent, but you don’t have the time to discover who is or who isn’t, and in a group project you can’t just kick people out because they don’t know what they are doing.

    Group project experiences:

    As team leader in a group project I organized the task divisions. One guy completely screwed his up, let us all down and our project was kinda a bust. This was the case for every other group as well, but that didn’t help the feeling of crushing failure that I’d delegated badly.

    In another group project, one guy was such a muppet he wrote a loading screen that came on screen for 10 seconds and delayed the launch of the application until it had gone. One of my friends ended up having to rewrite all of his code for that and everything else (later, when I had to code a loading screen, it was so simple I couldn’t believe he’d managed to get it so very wrong). Another of my friends was excluded from her sub-group in this project, as the other (male) members of that group took the tasks that had been assigned to that sub-group and did them all. When she finally told me, I flipped out and emailed the prof – he was really nice and took care of things. She said it wasn’t sexist, but I think it was because there’s no way they would have done that to another guy – even one as incompetent as loading screen guy, and my friend is a talented programmer.

    Problems with group projects in University:

    • People you work with don’t necessarily know what they’re doing.
    • You don’t necessarily respect each other. If I’m at a company, hopefully I respect people because they’ve gone through the same hiring process as I have. I should be able to assume they’ve proven their abilities. This is not the case at university.
    • In the real world, there are significant benefits to being liked that do not apply here (you don’t usually get graded on how easy you are to work with).
    • There is no clear hierarchy – even if you’re the group leader, that doesn’t mean you have years of experience and have proven yourself, it’s just luck of the draw or being the person that takes charge.

    All this leads to it being hard to delegate, and the same issues apply in a student organization – perhaps even more so.

    • People may not think you have a right to ask them to do anything.
    • There may be no significant downside (to them) in not doing it.
    • They may be disorganized, and forget.
    • They may think the task you’ve asked them to do is not important, but ignore the request instead of refusing.

    Trying to delegate more, I find three common scenarios.

    • I ask someone to do something, and it happens. These people are gold dust – keep them onside.
    • I ask someone to do something, and they do not respond. I chase it up, but in the end do it myself / ask someone more reliable.
    • I ask someone to do something, and they do not respond. It is a small task, which means I don’t necessarily remember to follow it up. It just doesn’t get done. Down the road, this causes problems.

    In the worse case, delegating takes more time than it would to do it myself. In the best case, I save myself time and give someone who deserves it more responsibility. In the best case, I leverage and more gets done.

    The question: how to maximize the best-case scenario, and minimize the worst-case?