Time is Finite
The guiding principle for optimizing your operations
The most important principle of my approach to productivity and optimizing operations is a simple one: Time is finite. Obvious, yes, yet, it’s common to lose sight of this and for expectations to snowball towards the infinite.
Your time is finite. This isn’t about your biological inevitability, though it’s also not not about that. You have a finite number of years in your life. That’s occasionally worth your attention.
More relevant for your day-to-day productivity is that your work time is finite. You have a finite number of meetings, emails, ideas and outcomes in each week, month, or quarter. That’s worth your constant attention.
I’ve worked with many high-output, highly motivated teams who keep long or undefined hours – a perfect storm for wishful thinking that infinite objectives are possible with hard enough work. But whether your team works 40, 72 or 100 hours per week, each is still a finite amount of time. Mistakenly assuming infinite elasticity will always stretch work too thin, and lower-priority work will readily fill any time not aggressively defended. In the end, the outcomes and the people both suffer.
By making the finiteness of your time a foundational pillar of your approach to your productivity and processes, you’ll center your attention on subtle prioritization tradeoffs that others may miss, and you’ll be empowered to identify and optimize them.
Here are three valuable, practical questions that this principle drives:
❗What should you stop doing?
The natural flow of modern work and life is relentlessly additive, with new pulls on your time and focus always fighting for your attention. Which of these are actually necessary for your current goals?
Be sure you’re subtracting. Often. Maybe it’s the biweekly meeting that isn’t yielding actionable outputs anymore, maybe it’s the bottom half of your email inbox, or maybe it’s the personal media habit that drags you down.
By keeping an eye out, I regularly reclaim and repurpose parts of my finite time to meet my evolving objectives. Constant vigilance in preemptively pruning the least valuable parts of your activities, responsibilities, and everyday flow gets you ready for the next fruitful opportunity for your finite time.
How can you best handle new tasks that emerge?
Let’s say a manager, colleague, collaborator or customer comes to you with a new task for you. Your plate already feels pretty full, but you agree that the new task has value, and you want to help. We’ve all been there.
The human tendency is to say “yes” and figure out how to make it work. Your time being finite means this “yes” should be a “yes, but” around the work to not do. It’s much more constructive than saying “no” – and has the benefit of ending in a “no” when “no” is the right answer.
When someone asks me to take on something new, I start a short, open conversation with them, grounded in respect and trust in other parties’ perspectives and incentives, and I usually learn something valuable through it.
Consider discussing the following questions:
What do you think I should not do, or do less of, in order to do this? They might have assumed you had free time and that they wouldn’t be displacing something important. Or, through an open dialogue, you might find that your own perspective on goals, deadlines and priorities deserves an adjustment.
What makes the new task important and timely to you? Maybe they can adjust or deprioritize their request. Or, maybe you learn that the new task is more important than you first thought.
What’s your perspective on the work that I do, and what’s most valuable to you as my partner? Few people will have the full picture of your work, so their answer will usually be “wrong” – but rarely 100% wrong. There’s something to learn by listening and filtering anyone’s perspective through your own to find actionable nuggets of insight on your prioritization.
How can you best interface with others’ finite time?
That’s all true for your teammates and partners, too. You’ve got a valuable outside perspective on what they do and where they may be able to reclaim some of their finite time. Share it, and always with a grain of salt – you don’t have the full picture of their work. But you don’t need to be right very often to have a positive impact on a colleague’s productivity.
Similarly, you should ask and task your collaborators the way you’d like them to ask and task you. Articulate the level of importance and urgency of what you need from them. Share your perspective, make them feel invited to discuss theirs with you, and be open to potentially changing your mind – and often learning something that helps you update your own priorities.
Put it into Practice
If you’ve just made a quarterly work plan or a set of personal New Year’s resolutions focused only on new things you’re going to do, also decide what you’re going to stop doing. Prune aggressively. You will always find valuable new seeds to fill any extra time.
Look for opportunities for earnest discussions with your collaborators to understand their priorities. Building this trust can take time and effort with some counterparts, and every person is different, but achieving that trust will optimize your collective finite time.
Pause to consider others’ finite time before asking a colleague for anything. Whether it’s pulling them into a big project or making a short request, first ground yourself in their time being finite. Give them the information they need to assess your ask against their priorities. This will lead you to more efficient ways to interface with them – and it’ll set a model for them to treat you the same way.