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Frederick the Great said, If you try to hold everything, you hold nothing I want to modify that a little bit to say, if you try to do everything, you do nothing.   When it comes to the all the projects and efforts placed on a Technology team you have to fall back to a list of agreed priorities.  I am currently watching my fearless leader trying to be every thing to everyone.   Don’t get me wrong, he is a super guy.  However,  he is going to run himself into the ground and I will need more than an oven mitt to clean up the post nuclear fallout from pieces of what will be left of his sanity.

This is isn’t an article pitching project management or time management. It’s about focus triage.  We are under siege, love that movie by the way, and we must repel borders. It is warfare and we must apply some military tactics.  A fight to the end is being waged for your time and attention by others. There is only so much one person can do and being pulled in to many directions simultaneously is very tiring and unproductive say nothing of the impacts to one’s quality of work product.

Know thy enemy — real time distractions have to be contended with (IM, phone, SMS, people stopping by to talk, etc).  I often have to combat some of these intrusions by just working from home a few days a week. Not that I don’t have a few interruptions at home from time to time.  Also, we are being barraged by “normal” distracting activities such as ill purposed meetings. These are a little more subtle, like having a meeting with no written agenda and the famous meeting to discuss having meetings.  Everyone has their jobs and priorities but we have to focus only the top ones.  I see one little one hour meeting here and there turn into 10-15 hours a week of idleness.  Then there is the endless followup meetings which seem to just become perpetual.

Since I have deemed the year 2008 as the year of “getting real”, we need to cut out the low-priority/useless meetings and interactions that we participate in.  We feel like we need to appease our friends/co-workers, contribute, or be a part of the issues.   We have to stop pretending that we can be all to everyone.  It’s just not real.  But if we choose not to recognize it  or continue to rationalize it we are going to look around and it will be September or October and we won’t really have completed anything but have started many.

We will always get taken to task for those things that we didn’t accomplish or play out the should’a woulda, coulda’s  but if I’m going to get my ass spanked for not doing everything, then I’m damn well going to get beaten for the little insignificant things.