You study a lot of stuff when you go to business school, and much of it defies application in the real world. Nevertheless, some of the things you learn are incredibly leveragable if you can find a way to transfer them out of the academic environment. These valuable things are not necessarily the precise subject matter of the courses you’re following, sometimes they’re organising principles that are not explicitly taught.
I have long wanted to understand how I was able to do so much, with so little time and so little sleep, while I was at Wharton, and yet I can’t seem to find any free time, nor the energy to do anything with the free time I do have, when I have to work for a living. The contrast between the two is remarkable, and I’d love to get at what the causes of the difference are.
I think it essentially boils down to three things. Self-organisation, timeliness/predictability and variety.
Self-organisation is the fact that I choose how to deal with the demands made of me by a business school. Those demands are severe but the requirements are clear, and the manner in which I produce the correct output is entirely up to me. This allows me to self-determine how I tackle the time constraints rather than have to contort my approach to fit the work schedule someone else has designed.
By Timeliness/Predictability, I mean the simple fact that things begin and end on time, and at clearly defined times. I also mean that things don’t last longer than they need to. At Wharton, we never spent 3 hours doing a piece of work that could be tackled in 90 minutes. Meetings were not a place for idle speculation, we expected everyone on a team to have done their work ahead of time and to be able to express clearly their point of view. At work, meetings turn into insufferable and intermlinable talking shops that consume your day with meaningless to-and-fro conversations that lead nowhere and seem to serve peoples egos more than they do the project. When things begin and end on time, the value of the time in-between the meetings you have is multiplied by a hundred because you can reliably plan to use that time. If you work in a culture where nothing begins or ends on time, you never leverage the time in-between meetings because you never know with any certainty whether you’ll really be free or not.
Variety refers to the fact that although you may be working solidly for 6 hours of the day in classes, it’s 4 different classes and the different subject matters keep you alert. You’re not being asked to switch gears every 5 minutes (which is what happens in my office because of constant interruptions from nearby colleagues, the telephone or ‘urgent’ emails), but nor are you required to review the same 80-page contract for a solid 5 hours, which is a skill only lawyers are genetically programmed to be able to complete. The variety of tasks and subjects allows you to stay alert.
So how to transpose this into your work life?
1/ Take control of the work you do. Don’t let others organise you. This means taking ownership and responsibility for the projects and your input into them because otherwise you become a cog in a machine, and you’re forced to work at the pace set by others.
2/ Impose your schedule on others. Don’t accept meetings outside your working day unless there’s a real need (someone else’s heavy schedule isn’t a real need). Start meetings on time, finish on time, tell people you have something else afterwards. Don’t let meetings be open-ended. Use agendas.
3/ Don’t answer the telephone when it rings. People abuse their ability to speak to you whenever they choose. Filter your internal calls, answer external calls where necessary. Shut down your email program and restart it when you’re ready to check email, rather than dealing with stuff as and when it arrives, and allowing it to set the pace of your work. Flush your blackberry down the toilet.
Easy principles to state. Harder to put into practice. But when you look at how much we are able to get done in a regulated environment, the payoff from this sort of approach is staggeringly large, both in terms of productivity and lifestyle.
