0:00
at some point in our careers, what we find, no matter what we're doing, what we find is that we can no longer just mess with time because as the cliche goes, time is finite and everybody has the same time, right?
Search this video
0:14
So at work you can roughly do three things with your time, even in life.
0:20
You can, number one, elongate it.
0:20
And what that means is you work more hours.
0:27
Second is, you save it and what that translates to is you work efficiently.
0:27
So you use tools and productivity hacks to become more efficient.
0:34
And the third is, you leverage it, which is you work on stuff that matters most.
0:41
And, so one of my observations, especially after I became a parent, is that having kids is great because you just rapidly hit the limits of the first two, right?
0:58
You rapidly hit the limits of elongating time because you cannot work more hours possibly.
1:03
You have a human being to look after and you've already tried all the time management hacks for being more efficient.
1:11
So you can no longer save time. Right?
1:11
So the only choice you're left with is leveraging it, which is working on stuff that truly matters. Right?
1:18
And so out of desperation, becoming a parent forces you to get really good at the third one, which is leveraging it.
1:32
And as I was kind of starting out in my product management career early years, this was at Google.
1:39
I had, my son was born three weeks into my tenure at Google.
1:39
So I joined the company and then I was like, "Okay, bye, bye everybody.
1:46
I'm going to go on a couple of weeks paternity leave."
1:50
And, so it was the first year of my child's life.
1:55
First year as a parent, for me.
1:55
And first year at this very high performing company where, frankly in the early days, I just felt like I was out of place.
2:01
Everybody was just more intelligent than me.
2:08
They just knew more than me, et cetera, et cetera.
2:08
And yet here I was, an extremely ambitious person who wanted to do really great work, very conscientious.
2:20
And so I had an extremely stressful couple of years during my time at Google because I was constantly feeling behind and I was working very hard, but I just did not feel like I was accomplishing enough, either at work or at home.
2:33
Now, of course it turns out, during those years I was constantly getting promoted like much quicker than most of my peers.
2:44
And yet, that external signal somehow did not really make any difference to my own score of how I should be doing and how I was falling short of the expectations that I had of myself.
2:57
So every day I would come back home and I'd chat with my wife and I'd just tell her about how stressed I was.
3:02
And incredibly stressful, was sleep issues, various other issues.
3:08
And the LNO framework, which I read about the ideas behind it in some blog post, which I can't actually, unfortunately can no longer find, but it kind of form the basis.
3:19
The ideas in there formed the basis of this LNO effectiveness framework, which is, effectively there are three types of tasks that you could do.
3:25
L tasks are leverage tasks, N tasks are neutral tasks and O tasks are overhead tasks.
3:32
So with L tasks, you put in X and you get 10 X or a 100 X back in terms of whatever the goal or metric is.
3:44
Neutral tasks, you basically, they're break even, you get one or 1. 1 X back.
3:49
And overhead tasks are ones where you get less than what you put in back, in terms of the return.
3:54
Now it turns out that for any individual, at any level you have to do tasks across the board.
4:00
You can't just completely avoid O tasks.
4:00
Sometimes you have to do them.
4:04
But what I realized is that I was attacking each task with the same degree of attention, perfection and without discriminating between tasks in terms of when my energy is high versus when it's low.
4:18
And so a simple tactic I used when I used to maintain a to-do list, I still do, a simple tactic I used to put this insight into action, is that every task that I had on my to-do list, I would just prefix it with the letter L, N or O, depending on my analysis of what kind of task it was.
4:36
And so just that simple gap between deciding to do a task and just forcing myself to think, "Wait, what kind of task is it?
4:43
Oh, it's an L task or, oh, it's an N task."
4:49
Really made a difference in terms of how I attacked that task during the day.
4:56
And also when I attacked it and the degree of perfection I pursued for it.
4:56
And again, I was, the strong, inner perfectionist who resisted doing a less than perfect job on something.
5:09
But rapidly as I kind of started putting this framework in place, I was able to get myself to be less of a perfectionist with N tasks and O tasks and therefore save time.
5:16
One thing I say is, for people like me, you should try to actively do a bad job on N tasks and certainly O tasks.
5:33
Because you're actively trying to do a bad job will actually be a pretty decent job, anyway.
5:40
So, by doing that, what you end up doing is, you end up focusing yourself on what really matters and you end up creating more time for that.
5:46
So the point here is not just work fewer hours.
5:52
It's the point here is, as you understand what the N tasks and O tasks are, and as you attack them with the kind of quality that they require, and they warrant, you end up saving a lot of time.
6:05
And that time you are now free to apply to doing an even better job on the L tasks.
6:11
And of course, this wasn't an overnight thing, but as I put this in place over a year or two, that was life changing for me.
6:17
Because the stress was gone because at the end of the day, I could keep a scorecard of like, did I get my L task done? I was still ambitious.
6:22
So I had a lot more things to do than I had time for.
6:27
But the satisfaction of having checked all my L tasks was just freed me to go home and not have to stress out about the job I did and the job that's ahead tomorrow.
6:34
And just help me to also be just much more present in the evening with my family and whatnot.
6:47
So those are some ideas around the LNO framework that, as I put in practice, it drastically changed the way I approached my work and really ended up increasing my effectiveness.