Making your priorities explicit

or, what to do as a manager when you’re spread too thin

There comes a time when there are too many things for you to feasibly do. You have transitioned from being able to do all the things — even if you’re not sleeping much and working extended hours — to not being able to do all the things. This is a great forced opportunity to practice ruthless prioritization. The alternative is that you continue to do all the things, but underperform and become unreliable. So, how do you figure out what to keep doing, and what to stop doing?

Manage your mindset

In startups, busy times do come in waves, but if you continue to progress in your career, the amount of potentially stressful things will keep increasing. As your influence reaches more and more people in an organization, you’re dealing with larger issues and higher stakes. So take a deep breath. This isn’t just a temporary situation to power through. You’ll have to learn how to metabolize the stress, rather than just tolerate it.

My previous manager Dan Pupius made the analogy of management as spinning plates in a circus (I’ve also read this analogy in The Manager’s Path). As an individual contributor, you spin maybe one, two, or even three plates. Now you have twenty plates to keep spinning — where do you spend your time and focus? Some plates you might be able to get started and hand off to someone else. Some plates don’t need active spinning, just an occasional glance to make sure they’re not wobbling and about to fall.

Review your things

First, write down everything you feel responsible for on individual sticky notes and put them on a whiteboard. Some of these may be super clear, like the health and execution of the team you lead.

Some are a little more implicit — for example, occasional candidate outreach, general oversight of a certain part of the codebase, or documenting on-boarding procedure for future new hires. Writing them down helps makes them explicit.

Move the sticky notes around to stack-rank them roughly in order of priority. Some questions to keep in mind when you do this:

What’s the impact of doing this? What’s the impact of not doing this? Am I the only person who can do this? Is there someone else who could step up to do this? How important or urgent is this?

For example, if you spend several hours a week reviewing code for a specific service you built, ask yourself, what’s the worst thing that would happen if you stop doing that? The code doesn’t live up to your expectations? Are there tests to act as a safeguard against really bad failures? What if letting go lets someone else step up and feel ownership for a part of the system?

Draw a line

Now that you have all your things prioritized, draw a line. Everything above the line is stuff you will continue doing, and everything below you will not (or will seriously scope down). Make sure to include some time for truly important but not urgent things, like on-boarding documentation for future new hires, or preparing for summer interns — an hour a week may be sufficient to move it forward. Some items below the line may require some transition. Hand someone else that plate! This is a great opportunity to have someone else on the team with more bandwidth step up and take ownership of something.

Oh right. How do you know if you’ve drawn the line in the right place? You should feel a sense of relief.

Communicate to others

In your next 1:1 with your manager, take the initiative to review your list. “I want to make sure my priorities are in line with your expectations — is there any context you have that changes these priorities?” Make sure to review everything below the line, and go over your transition plans. This is managing up, and instills confidence in your manager that you are thinking critically about your impact and work.

Next, if any of the things you’re dropping are significant roles, make sure to communicate them clearly to the rest of the team. I was once Tech Lead-ing a small team, as well as managing about 10 engineers. As the small team was about to grow, I realized I would rather spend that time doing individual contributor (IC) work alongside the people management. So I discussed this option with my manager, chose someone to take over as Tech Lead, and communicated these changes to the team. People are often reluctant to relinquish roles, but whenever I’ve seen overloaded coworkers clearly communicate that they’re cutting back on some aspect of their work to focus on another, I’ve felt immense respect for their introspection and prioritization.

Try not to break too many plates

You might not be spinning some plates actively anymore, but you may still be responsible for them. It takes some practice and mistakes to figure out how to tell if a plate is wobbling and about to fall. If you stop attending daily stand-ups for a team, maybe you need to read the tech lead’s weekly update on progress towards goals.

Sometimes plates fall and break, and the best you can do is try to learn from your mistakes.

And at some point, if your plates increase steadily despite your ruthless prioritization and delegation, you may just need to shout, “Hey I can’t do this by myself — we gotta hire another plate spinner!”

After many years working full-time at tech companies, I’m now coaching and consulting engineering teams. If you’d like some help scaling your team or developing yourself as a leader, email me at jean@jeanhsu.com.