Tell me if this sounds familiar.
You get to the end of a really busy week, you’re feeling tired, mentally drained and are ready for the weekend. You’ve worked really hard and you can feel it.
You then think about what you actually did during the week and what you ticked off your to-do list.
Nothing.
But you know that you did a lot of stuff and that stuff was definitely important.
Yet, you still struggle to point towards tangible things that you got finished.
The chances are that you were operating from within what’s called the whirlwind.
Sure, you’re working hard and doing work that needs to be done. It’s not that the work wasn’t important, but it’s quite rare for this kind of work to push you forward as a manager or leader.
Another term for this kind of work is fire fighting. Meaning that you’re jumping from fire to fire and putting them out, implying that your work is very reactive to what’s going on around you.
Again, this is important and needs to be done, but do you think that you’re being at your most effective if this is how you work all of the time?
No, you’re not.
Not only that, but working this way for a sustained period of time will almost certainly lead to disengagement with your role, frustration at your perceived lack of progress and if things get really bad, burnout.
Let’s talk about how to avoid getting to this point and how you can embrace the inevitable whirlwind and fire fighting that exists in most companies (especially agencies!)
What exactly is the whirlwind?
Despite experiencing the whirlwind throughout my career, it was only when I read a book called The Four Disciplines of Execution that I learned that this was a “thing” and that it had a name.
The authors talk about the whirlwind as tasks which are urgent and / or important and require completing in order to keep the business running.
Again, we’re talking about tasks that matter here – not things that drain your time and energy, but don’t really matter.
At an agency, we’re talking about things such as:
- Attending recurring meetings.
- Answering client questions and emails.
- Producing and sending reports.
- Responding to urgent client problems.
These are all important and part of the job when it comes to running a successful agency.
But… These tasks, despite enabling the business to function, get in the way of you working on the bigger picture. They get in the way of your strategic priorities. They are a classic example of things that lead to you working “in” the business rather than “on” the business.
For a manager, this means that you’re working on things that keep your team functioning, but probably don’t push the team forward overall.
This is why you can get to the end of a week, having worked really hard, yet feel like you haven’t achieved or worked on anything big.
Let’s be real about the whirlwind
Before we talk about how to be effective in the midst of the whirlwind, it’s important to understand and be comfortable with something.
You can’t prevent the whirlwind.
Therefore, the solution here isn’t to try and get rid of it.
It just won’t happen. There are a bunch of tasks that need to be done for a business to operate and survive. Problems and challenges will always hit you out of nowhere, no matter how good you are at planning.
Accept that the whirlwind exists and that you will spend a good chunk of your time on it.
That’s okay.
So, the question is, how do we operate and be effective in our roles, whilst accepting that we’ll get pulled into a lot of tasks that aren’t about the bigger picture or goals?
Let’s answer that question.
How to be effective in the midst of the whirlwind
If what we’ve talked about so far resonates, I’d highly recommend grabbing a copy of The Four Disciplines of Execution. It goes into far more detail about this whole area and presents a solid system for working on (and achieving) your big goals.
In the meantime, the steps and actions below can give you plenty to be thinking about.
List your big projects that move your team forward
You’ll never escape the whirlwind if you don’t know what to work on instead. So the first step is to be very clear on how you want to strategically improve your team. What big projects would you love to be able to work on?
You may consider things such as:
- Updating and refreshing your approach to personal development planning for your whole team.
- Putting in place a new 12 month training plan for all team members.
- Trialling new tools that the team can use to manage their to-do lists and tasks.
These are things that aren’t necessary for the business to function day-to-day, but they are things that have the potential to improve performance of the team over the long-term.
The problem is, because they aren’t necessarily important or urgent in the day-to-day, they can get pushed down the to-do list and never worked on.
Ultimately, whatever projects you think will improve performance of your team in the long-term, make a big list as a starting point.
Get clear on how you can effectively spend time on these projects
Everyone is different in how they work best. But the chances are that if you want to work on these types of projects, you’ll need some focused, dedicated, uninterrupted time.
How can you best get this?
It may be working from home instead of the office. Or locking yourself in an office meeting room for a few hours. Setting your Slack status to do not disturb and turning off emails. It may be telling your team that you’re working on some important projects and to give you space for a few hours, then putting your headphones on.
This can also be described as Deep Work which I’ve written about before and I’d recommend that you take a look at it if you struggle to find time to dedicate to bigger, intense projects.
Break down projects into achievable chunks and tasks
A project isn’t something that you can just tick off your to-do list. The chances are that there are a bunch of actions and tasks that you need to complete before a project can be marked as done.
Using one of the examples above, you are unlikely to just tick off “Putting in place a new 12 month training plan for all team members.”
Instead, it’s likely to involve a bunch of steps, such as:
- Listing skill gaps for each team member.
- Assessing what training you already have which the team can complete.
- Researching online training platforms or external experts who can deliver training.
- Getting budget sign off from your manager.
These are suddenly a lot more achievable than “Putting in place a new 12 month training plan for all team members.”
So ensure that you break down a project into tasks so that when the time comes to work on them, you can attack the to-do list effectively and get things done.
Don’t be afraid to say no to the whirlwind
A trap that many managers fall into is being a little too supportive of their teams. By this I mean that we always say yes when a team member asks for our help.
I mean, that’s what a good manager should do, right?
Kind of.
There are all sorts of reasons why we shouldn’t always drop everything to help a team member. But in the context of this topic, the core reason is that if we’re always saying yes to our team’s requests for our time, we’ll never be able to carve out the time we need to step out of the whirlwind.
When you get asked for help when you were actually planning on spending some valuable time on your own projects, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask if they need your time immediately i.e. is their request urgent, or can they wait a few hours or until tomorrow.
In most cases, what they’re asking for isn’t urgent. Yes, it may be important, but most tasks are not urgent + important. Therefore, you don’t need to drop everything to work on them.
