Triaging Is a Life Skill
Play the long game with your Triage Shield
We’ve now spent the month exploring the Triage Shield concept completely. Here’s a summary of the ground we’ve covered:
Triage Shield - Your Triage Shield clearly separates the work you control from the inputs that you do not control. Fully constructed, it defends your sanity and allows you to spend more time in flow on the soul of your work.
External Brain - Your External Brain is a structured digital store that you can rely on to manage all of your work and all the details. Fully functional, this offloads a bunch of burden on your brain, freeing your brain to do what it does best: create.
Managing Email - Perhaps the single biggest input you’ll have to wrangle, email is the standard method of communication. Get on top of your email, and remove that dark cloud that’s been hovering over your head.
Herding Chats - Chats are used more pervasively now, but because of the lack of organization, most of the information exchanged in chats is lost. By intentionally handling each chat, you can ensure all asks that others have of you are captured.
Manage Project Tasks Responsibly - Having your own work management system track all the work you are responsible for is how you can more readily see everything on your plate, and reason about relative prioritization of all of your work. It also makes it easier to identify when you’re overcommitted and take early corrective actions with your team.
Make Meetings Worth the Time - Modeling the reliable capturing of all action items in a meeting is a great way to ensure that costly meetings are effective. More effective meetings leads to a more productive team.
Harness the Power of “Idea Bombs” - The single biggest lost input across your entire system are your own ideas. Creating an instantaneous system for capturing the continuous drip of ideas from your brain will unlock your creativity.
Each of these seven posts have focused on the isolated development of one triage muscle at a time. Now, following the Workout Mentality mindset, it’s time to talk about putting these muscles to use in concert, and integrating Triage Shield into the rest of your Grand Synthesis1.
Play the long game2
This month we have talked about how to get on top of all of your inputs. Now it’s time to talk about how to stay on top of all of your inputs.
Before I had a Triage Shield, managing my inputs felt just like a crash diet. I would get behind, and after dropping the ball on missed communication or failing to follow through on a commitment, I would feel bad and vow to do better. I would take an entire workday (sometimes even two or three days) to clean through all of my email and chats. I would feel great after completing this purge, but without any routine in place, it wouldn’t take long for my email and chats to be out of control again.
The true measure of success for your Triage Shield is how long you are able to stay on top of all of your inputs. You have established processes, and you have created space in your routine to allow you to regularly execute these triage processes. This is the sustainable way to stay on top of all of the inputs. This is the new you. And this is you for life.
Triaging is the art of deciding. What do you take on and what do you dismiss? How long will it take you? What is the relative priority of that work? It’s going to be painfully slow at the start. But stick with it. What you are building is a life skill. Keep practicing, keep improving, and keep your eye on the prize: you will eventually reach the unconsciously aware3 stage where triaging is second nature to you.
Remember the goal state of your Triage Shield: on top of all your inputs, and buried by none of them. You’re not earning your paycheck when you’re triaging. But by expertly triaging, you are creating more space in each and every workday in which to earn your paycheck, and to thrive.
Observe your process
Your Triage Shield is not static. It is ever-improving. So you need to stay vigilant of the opportunities for improvement, through the Actor/Observer dual focus3. There will always be new trends in your inputs that can help you group inputs together for faster processing. And there will always be new features added to the tools you use, and even entirely new tools, which can accelerate your triaging.
Another important thing to watch for is when your processes aren’t keeping up. The great part about having a Triage Shield is that you know what it feels like to have your inputs under control. So you can pretty easily spot when there’s been a problematic surge in inputs. Most people still buried under their inputs will just continue to reactively behave like the frog in the pot of water heating on the stove. You can more readily spot these surges. And when you do, here are the options to proactively resolve the situation:
Is this a short term surge of one type of input? For instance, during product planning, there will be pretty constant churn in the project work item list as the plan takes shape. Identify events or cycles that lead to surges, and then plan accordingly with matching short term “surge triage” blocks on your calendar. Whenever I did people reviews, I added extra communication triage blocks on my calendar to handle all the extra mails and chats that accompanied these discussions.
Is this a long term increase in one type of input? This is when you should uplevel the conversation. Step back from the pile of inputs and ask what’s changed in the team’s processes, organization, or culture that may be contributing to this uptick. Proactively diagnose and offer guidance to the team. Another place where your private victory can lead to public victory.
Is this a long term increase across several or all types of input? When this happens, despite your Triage Shield performing well, it is typically an early warning sign of being overextended. The upleveled way to address this is either (a) you spot delegation opportunities where you can offload some of your responsibilities to your team or (b) you raise a caution flag with your management and see if there are rebalancing opportunities.
Returning from a trip
Your system is in place. It’s purring along. You are in flow for more hours of the day. And then you take a much-deserved week off with your family. You have a great time swimming, hiking, and eating out with your spouse and kids. With this healthy energy injection to your Energy Flywheel4, you return to work the next week ready to rock. But what you’re greeted with is 1,500 unread emails, 200 new chat messages, amidst an already fully scheduled day. Good luck keeping your flywheel revved!
The right way to make sure that all the energy recharge you got from your vacation stays with you beyond the first hour in the office is to, no surprise, plan ahead. When you set up the out of office block on your calendar, add one more day to that block: the first day you are back in the office. This will keep your calendar clear such that, on the day you return, you can devote the day to getting yourself back on track. Take this catch-up day to execute your same triage processes, just all in longer form.
While it may not be fun to be in triage mode for the entire day, the upside is that after that single day commitment, you can pick up where you left off, with all of your inputs drained and all action items tracked.
How many hours do you spend triaging?
In the peak of my manager of managers role, with my Triage Shield in full effect, I estimate that I spent two hours per day triaging. That’s 20% of my 10-hour workday. Is that a lot? It definitely sounds significant. But at the same time, with my triage time very clearly set aside in my routine, it was pretty easy to calculate this. I didn’t have triage time bleeding into the rest of my work. And with this cleaner separation, it also meant fewer context switches. That translated to less time spent ramping my focus and energy back up.
Do you have any idea how may hours you spend triaging? Triaging should not be the gas that expands to fill all available space. You can feel very productive triaging, so it’s important that you remind yourself that you’re not being paid to triage. You’re being paid to produce. Put your triaging in its place -- and keep it there -- and watch your productivity explode.