Create and guard the margin – you need space for the high-value | Working Principles

How busy are you? Was your immediate response “too busy”? You aren’t the only one.

Many of us know that frustrating feeling of being asked about an action in a meeting only to realise that we haven’t made any progress because we’ve been in back-to-back meetings since the action was given to us. Why didn’t we make progress on the action? Because we didn’t have any margin.

If we don’t even have margin to complete our actions then how are we going to start new things, more interesting, more fulfilling things.

There’s a relationship here with my previous post Irreplaceable = Unpromotable | Working Principles.

Organisations are littered with activity that is no longer required, things that are being done because they’ve always been done, business that is consuming our margin to do that special something.

When was the last time you looked through your daily activities and asked yourself – why? Why am I doing this? If I stopped doing it would anyone notice, would anything break? If I don’t attend this meeting, will it make a difference to the outcome?

I have occasionally run little experiments where I have quietly stopped doing things. In most of these experiments my lack of activity went entirely unnoticed. A big part of my workday is taken up with meetings and it turns out that there are many meetings that run just fine without me.

If we don’t even bother asking ourselves why we do things when was the last time you contemplated these questions? Is there a better way of doing this? How does Jane/John do this so much quicker than I do? Where can I learn from others? What can I do to simplify and automate this activity?

Remaining curious is a wonderful thing and another great way of ceasing activity, but we need margin to even start to answer these questions.

Another question we should be asking ourselves is, what is all this activity costing? I’m primarily talking here about the missed opportunities. Yes, there’s a cost in the churn of time, but there’s a much bigger and far more significant cost when we consider the things we didn’t do.

What if we had attended that training rather than attend that meeting?

What if we had worked through that difficult problem rather than respond to those 200 emails?

What if we had ignored all those chats and instead taken a walk at lunchtime?

There are all sorts of complex reasons why we don’t do this, it’s not easy. Life is full of competing “what if’s.” What if I don’t attend that meeting and something vital happens? What if I don’t respond to those emails and miss one that is crucial? What if I ignore those chats and one of them is from my boss needing my urgent help? There’s a potential cost to stopping, but there’s already a cost to continuing.

We need to create and guard the margins, the best way to create margin is to stop doing things, but that’s just the first step. Having eked out a margin, we need to protect it. Sadly, not many of us work in organisations where they manage our margin for us, we are going to have to be the watchkeepers of our time and attention.

For me there are a few ways that I try to master my margin. The first way I do it is to use the tools available to me and define Focus Time in Outlook. This is one of those areas where a little bit of AI helps in the form of Viva Insights and the Focus Plan. Rather than booking the same time every day which is impractical for most of us, using Viva Insights my Focus Time is created in the slots without prearranged meetings. The Focus Time is booked with notifications turned off and my status set to “Do not disturb.” There are some people who I need to respond to if they reach-out, so they are defined as “priority contacts.” They know that if they really want me to respond they’ll have to mark the message as urgent.

The other thing that I do is to make sure that my priority list for the day starts with the high-value item that I want to do in my Focus Time. There’s a mental note there that the highest priority is in the highest value, not in the meetings, the messages or the emails.

Even with Focus Time defined I still need to protect my margin from myself. It can be a temptation to regard Focus Time as a great time to go through my inbox which is highly unlikely to result in anything of true value. The curse of urgency over importance.

Another important part of guarding my margin is my morning walk, a time when I try to focus on being present. Margin is as much about mental state than anything else.

Some people have more freedom and flexibility than others. Some people are better at this kind of self-organisation than others. We each need to find our own way but if we don’t create margin we generating huge missed opportunity costs.

Header Image: A recent frosty morning walk sunrise.