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I cut from two operations days a week to one and watched email slow down while support got faster. That gap exposed a trade-off that was never real, and a way through it.
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I cut from two operations days a week to one and watched email slow down while support got faster. That gap exposed a trade-off that was never real, and a way through it.
Featuring: George Bernard Shaw
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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
George Bernard Shaw
I went from two operations days a week to one. That gave me six days a week of unbroken focus. Email, support requests and coordination all get handled on the one operations day. Cut the admin time in half and everything I handle should get slower.
Email and coordination did get slower. Support requests got faster.
When I made the cut, I switched support requests from something I check to something that reaches me on its own. A notification lands the second a request comes in, instead of waiting in a queue I open on my operations day.
Most trade-offs are real. You can't be in two places at once. You can't spend the same dollar twice. Those are laws. You pay one thing to get another and there's no way around it.
Some trade-offs only look real. They're conventions everyone agreed to and then forgot were optional. The wall everyone walks up to and turns around at has a way through it. I call that way a tunnel: a route through a trade-off most people treat as a solid wall.
The best opportunities hide in the fake trade-offs. Everyone treats the wall as solid, so no one looks for the tunnel.
Here's a tunnel you might already use. You want to read more. Books take hours you don't have, so the reading never happens. Your commute is an hour of dead time anyway. An audiobook makes the drive your reading time.
With a real trade-off, you pay no matter what you do. With a fake one, you pay only until you find the tunnel.
Which wall could you walk through instead of around?
The body uses option 1 (audiobook). Swap in any of these as the universal example.
1. Audiobook on the commute. You want to read more. Books take hours you don't have, so the reading never happens. Your commute is an hour of dead time anyway. An audiobook makes the drive your reading time.
2. The potluck. Hosting ten people means a day in the kitchen cooking for ten. So you don't host. A potluck splits the cooking ten ways. You host the whole group on the effort of one dish.
3. The red-eye flight. A trip costs you a day of travel or a night in a hotel. The red-eye runs while you'd be asleep anyway. You arrive with the day intact and the hotel night unspent.