Pre-read 2: The Law of Priorities
Being busy is not the same as getting results. Busy leaders and effective leaders keep different calendars.
The standard first: Eisenhower, Pareto, and the delegation rule
Three tools engineers already trust, used together:
The Eisenhower matrix. Sort work by urgent vs important. That gives four boxes. The painful finding is always the same: the urgent-but-not-important box eats senior people's time, because urgent work arrives with your name on it and important work does not.
The Pareto principle. About 20 percent of your activities produce about 80 percent of your results. The useful part is the other side: the remaining 80 percent of your activities are candidates to cut, group, or hand off. Most of them feel productive while you do them.
The 80 percent delegation rule. If someone can do a task at least 80 percent as well as you, hand it off. Not because 80 is as good as 100. The small quality difference on that task is worth less than what you could produce with the free time. Also, the other person's 80 becomes 95 only by doing the work.
Add Paul Graham's idea of the maker schedule vs the manager schedule. Makers need long blocks of quiet time. Managers work hour by hour. Senior engineers suffer when they live on both schedules at the same time without choosing one.
The law behind the standard
Maxwell sorts priorities with three Rs. A block of your time is a good use only if it is a Requirement (only you can do it, and your role demands it), a Return (it uses your strengths and produces large results), or a Reward (it gives you energy to keep going). Everything else is activity that looks like progress but is not.
This is the most measurable law in the course. That is why your first evidence artifact is a calendar audit. Your calendar is a dataset. It records what you actually chose, not what you planned to choose.
On your track
- IC (Staff/Principal): your calendar does not fill with meetings. It fills with review requests, Slack messages, and "do you have 5 minutes?" Same audit, different noise. The senior IC trap is being the helpful bottleneck.
- Lead/EM: your calendar fills with meetings you did not choose. The audit shows which ones are Requirements and which ones are just habits.
The story: Jobs and the 1997 product grid
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company sold dozens of products that overlapped each other. Each product was somebody's "important work". He drew a simple 2x2 grid: consumer and pro, desktop and portable. Four products. Everything outside the grid was cancelled, including products that made money. The list of things he cut, not the list of things he did, is what saved the company.
Before the session
Come with one question this reading left you with. Starting points:
- Look at last week's calendar honestly. What percentage of it was none of the three Rs?
- What is the one repeated meeting or task you already know you should cut? What makes cutting it feel impossible?