Harry 0:00

I'm probably the poster child for procrastination on some level. But I think understanding what's most important, which is really the functional definition of having a priority, that and the process of getting there, those become your inputs to your plans and your decisions and those plans and decisions are what allow you to become more productive.

Narrator 0:34

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:44

Hey, Harry. Good to see you.

Harry 0:46

Ah, excellent to see you, Jorge. You look great today.

Jorge 0:49

So do you! You're wearing one of my favorite colors, purple.

Harry 0:53

Yeah, I wear this because some of my clients call me a wizard. I'm at a client site today, so I'm wearing my wizard shirt.

Jorge 1:03

Last time we met, we mentioned this change that I'm going through with this new consultancy that I've launched. And I've been revisiting some books that have influenced me in one way or another and I've brought a reading from one of them to share with you 'cause I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

Harry 1:26

Oh, I'm really looking forward to it. Surprise me, man. Let's do it.

Jorge 1:30

Alright, so this is not very long, but let's see how it goes. "If everyone has the same number of hours in a day, why do some people seem to get so much more done than others? How do they do more, achieve more, earn more, have more? If time is the currency of achievement, then why are some able to cash in on their allotment for more chips than others? The answer is they make getting to the heart of things the heart of their approach. They go small. "When you want the absolute best chance to succeed at anything you want, your approach should always be the same. Go small. "'Going small' is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It's recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It's a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It's realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus."

Harry 2:52

I love that, number one. Number two, I wish I'd written it. Number three, I feel like I should have read it because of my interest in prioritization, but I don't recall ever having read it, which leads me to wonder if it's one of the book books on habits.

Jorge 3:13

It's not a book on habits. This is the focus of this book, it's focus, and it's called The ONE Thing. The subtitle is The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, and it's by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. I think that's how that's pronounced.

Harry 3:34

Now, the crazy thing is I have read that book, but I did not remember that piece of it. And I loved that book and I've recommended it countless times, so I'm so glad you brought it into the foreground and actually prompted me to realize that I'd forgotten just how good that book was.

Jorge 3:59

Yeah. I only read it for the first time toward the end of last year as I was pondering all these changes that I'm now rolling out and I was thinking, "I am gonna shift my focus." And one of the hard things about shifting focus and this is why I wanted to talk about this book and about these ideas in general is that when you've been doing something for a long time, your attention is on those things. And then if you're going to make a pivot or change, move in a different direction, if you want to have any kind of impact, you have to devote more of your attention in that direction. And the question is, how do you manage that? And this is something that I, expect that you have thoughts on, given your work on prioritization. But I'll give you just a very vivid example of that and hopefully get your advice. This is like free coaching that I'm doing with this, with today's session here. So, I recently turned down the opportunity to estimate a project that would've been the sort of thing that I would've done in the past, right? So it's like a classic information architecture design project. And I'm in a period right now where I'm really busy and the prospect needed a very quick turnaround and I wasn't gonna be able to do it justice. So that's a big part of my turning it down. But another reason why I turned it down is that I want to make more space for the kind of work that Greg and I are gonna be doing in this consultancy. And that is a different focus than the focus that I've had in the past. But it's not an easy thing to do. I think Andy Warhol used to say that someone has to bring home the bacon, right? So it's so, it's, tricky, right? Because on the one hand, I need projects. I've been, so far, a UX design consultant focused on information architecture. And where do you draw the line and how do you make that transition? And how do you focus on the one thing while you are... how do you change the tires on a car that's in motion, basically?

Harry 6:27

It is funny, so much of the work that I've done in prioritization is a result of having been involved in complex replatforming and transitional projects, and I think it's really informed a lot of the philosophy that's gone into my thinking around this. But, you know, what do they say about strategy? If we had all the resources in the world, and all the time in the world, we would just do everything, right? But we don't, and therefore we have to learn how to say no or not yet to a set of things so that we can say yes to the thing that's even more important. And William Ury wrote a book called The Power of a Positive No, which was instrumental in some of my early thinking. And, in fact, mutual colleagues and friends of ours, i've recommended this book to so many people because it gives you a set of techniques for saying no in a way that is respectful and honors the intent behind what somebody's asking you to do or to pay attention to, but is even more respectful of whatever it is that's even more important possibly to them and certainly to you and figuring out how to say, "yes and it will require all these additional resources" or "Yes, and you'll need to bring in this other person or this new set of tools 'cause I'm no longer available." Like, what is the way to say no becomes part of the challenge. It's not just saying it, but how do you say it. And the other thing that I was thinking of when you brought this up is, I interviewed a lot of people senior people who were extremely good at getting amazing things, reaching amazing goals, and doing incredible things. And one of the key ideas that came out among all of these interviewees, and it's built into chapter nine in my book, is that, if you have a periodic prioritization process or a habit or something that you do on a frequent basis to reset how it is you're gonna approach where you're placing your attention, one particularly potent way to do that is to make sure in that periodic practice that you always attend to whatever your strategic goal is by looking at the smallest, most actionable, responsible step you can take to pursue it, and just do that. And if you do that regularly, what will happen is eventually you'll either achieve that particular goal or you will have executed a transition into what that focus was, right? And so, that morning boot routine, which Christina Wodtke documented so many years ago on her Elegant Hack blog and then it got codified again and updated in my book is a pattern that says, the first, thing you need to do is identify what you're avoiding and then attack that. And the second thing you need to do is attend to whatever the item is with the highest cost of delay, that is to say, the longer you weigh, the more painful or expensive it's gonna get. But the third element there is making sure that you've got your top goal or your primary area of investment clear enough so that you can pinpoint just the next thing that needs your attention and continue chipping away at that. Because what happens is it may start very small, but over time it becomes a very large percentage of where your attention and time, energy, and effort can go.

Jorge 10:46

The, thought that comes to mind there is that old joke about how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, right?

Harry 10:54

In effect, I've just never been a big fan of killing or eating elephants.

Jorge 10:59

I know, neither am I. I've never, partaken of elephant meat. In the book, I wanna circle back to The ONE Thing because, like I said, I read it last year and I made some notes then, but I revisited it now in preparation of this conversation. And the authors outline a list of what they call four thieves of productivity. And, I just wanted to call out that the very first one on the list is something that you've brought up here, which is the inability to say no. And that's something that I've had to work on for myself. One of my deficits. I would say it like this, one of my character flaws is that I am one of these people who likes to please people. And it's really hard for me to do things that I feel are going to let people down. And often what that results in is my over committing to things. So, I feel like this is not just an opportunity for me to try this new direction, but also if I'm conscious of the fact, that that is an issue with me, this is an opportunity for me to flex the no-saying muscle. And, and I just wanted to, put a... not a hack, but like a suggestion out there, in preparation for writing my response to this prospect who was asking for my services, I used chat GPT to engage on a dialogue about how do I craft a response that is respectful of what the prospect is asking for, of the conversation that we've had so far, but also that helps me draw certain boundaries around my time and my interest. And I found that really useful because it it allowed me to think about what I was going to say from a position that would not have come naturally to me. It allowed me to de-center myself.

Harry 13:21

Figuring out how to dissociate and move outside of yourself to look at the situation and using a tool like ChatGPT to give you that perspective is an oddly powerful way of doing that. Hadn't considered that specific application and why it's so valuable. Three things came to mind. Number one is that, when you brought this up, I had forgotten that, for me, there's a very hard line I draw between productivity and prioritization. And I am definitely not a productivity guru, nor am I a productivity expert. In fact, I'm probably the poster child for procrastination on some level. But I think understanding what's most important, which is really the functional definition of having a priority, that and the process of getting there, those become your inputs to your plans and your decisions and those plans and decisions are what allow you to become more productive. The next thing that popped into my head was that the term priority.... I mentioned this, Keller in his book might have mentioned this, but I know I mentioned it in my book, and I know, I think Greg McKeown in his book Essentialism brought this to my attention, is that the word priority historically wasn't plural, it was singular, right? There were no such things as priorities, that's a more modern construct. And the fact is, we have priorities now because we have multiple priorities in different categories. Because in a singular category so, for example, things you need to get done there actually is only one priority, and that's the thing at the top of the list. And that thing at the top of the list isn't necessarily telling you have to do that, it's telling you where to put your attention so you can make a good decision, a good choice. It's your best option among the good ones rather than, as my friend Scott Sulliver says, your least bad one among the less good ones. And then, I was reflecting on what we spoke about a few minutes ago when I said yes and as a vehicle for saying no. And that came out of the Keith Johnstone work on improv. He wrote a book called Impro. And if you've ever studied improv, and I suspect you have, where you've learned how to participate in an improv session, or improv game, or improv show. Certainly the most popular and easy to remember principles of improv is the yes and directive, which is, in improv, you never say no because it creates stop energy. You say yes and, and then you qualify it in order to put whatever qualification is gonna be necessary to keep the story going. And so, the idea of looking at Ury's work in the power of a positive no, and then linking that to this improv technique, which is so powerful, even if you don't say it like yes and, you can ask me to do something, and I can go, "That's a distinct possibility." What I was thinking was, that's a version of yes and right. There are lots of different ways of invoking yes and without saying no, N-O. So, I really related to your comment about pleasing people because, funny, in another conversation you and I were talking about neurolinguistic programming, NLP, and interestingly, one of the most senior teachers or instructors in my NLP training said to me, "You know what your problem is, Harry?" And I was like, "What?" He said, "You don't know how to say no." And I was like, "What do you mean I don't know how to say no?" And he said, "Give me ten phrases that mean no." And I couldn't come up with two. And he said, "Your homework for the next week is to come up with a hundred different ways of saying no without using the word no." And that was my homework. And that's where I came up with all sorts of clever little well, I thought they were clever little things but if we're ever in a meeting together and somebody says something and you hear me say, "I'm confused," what that actually means is NFW. That's my stop word for myself to remember that I'm not allowed to say no. I have to reorient the conversation and move it forward in a more productive way. And that came out of that work in NLP where my instructor said I needed better ways of saying no. I might suggest to you that a) you pick up a copy of William Ury's book just because it's not like you need to read the whole book, it's way too many pages that cover the same concept. You know, how to say yes to something bigger and more important by somehow gracefully saying no to the thing that would prevent that from being true. And then maybe spend the time to come up with a hundred different ways to say no, and then pick two or three that really work for you or that, and then try 'em out. Run an experiment. See how people react to 'em.

Jorge 19:12

That's great suggestion. I'm gonna check it out. We're coming to the end of our time here and I realize that I've already read a passage from a book today. But hearing you say this brought to mind one of my favorite quotes of all time, and I'm gonna read it to you. This is from Steve Jobs, and he said, "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on, but that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things."

Harry 19:54

I love that.

Jorge 19:56

Yeah, I, think that's spot on and it's making me feel better about my having said no.

Harry 20:06

These conversations are so enlivening. My whole day is better every day we talk.

Jorge 20:11

Same here. Thank you so much for making time for it, Harry.

Harry 20:14

I really appreciate it. Thanks Jorge.

Narrator 20:22

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.