Serenity Now, Productivity Later: Focus Your Project Stack with The Gonzalez Matrix - posit::conf
Presented by Patrick Tennant How should you respond when your boss has too many good ideas for data science projects? In this talk, I'll review our use of an adapted version of the Eisenhower Matrix that lays out our projects according to the effort required and the value they will produce. Given the functionally unlimited number of data science projects a team could do, learn how we keep our team focused on valuable work while reducing the stress of a never-ending list of projects. Presented at Posit Conference, between Sept 19-20 2023, Learn more at posit.co/conference. -------------------------- Talk Track: Building effective data science teams. Session Code: TALK-1065
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Hi everybody, good afternoon. Thank you for being here, and thank you to Daniel and Liz and Andrew. Awesome talks so far, really appreciate that, a lot of good info in there. Welcome everybody who's coming in, and thank you for coming to see me. My name is Patrick Tennant, and the title of my talk is Serenity Now, Productivity Later.
So, I'm going to start with a quick story, and I think it's one you're going to recognize. It's early one morning, my daughters have just left for school, and so my house is still and quiet. It's about 7 a.m., so I've just poured my fourth cup of coffee, and I'm ready to rock and roll. You know, I'm excited, I'm feeling positive about the day, looking forward to getting a lot of stuff done. I go upstairs, and I sit down at my desk, and I open my work email, and boom, a flood of messages from my boss. She's got new project ideas, she's got additions to existing projects, she's got additions to those additions, right? There's a lot of stuff in my inbox this morning, and I start thinking, you know, I had enough to do today already. I did not need more on my project stack, and as I start to go through these new suggestions, these new ideas, I feel just sort of like this. I'm going to call this feeling deflated, but I actually just don't know the word in English that is as accurate as this for the feeling that I have in that moment, where you just, you're zapped, right? You've sort of lost your motivation, your excitement for the day. You're just feeling like, man, I am overwhelmed, and I almost want to do nothing, just because I have so much to do.
So, I tell you the story, because like I said, I think it's probably recognizable to many of you. We all sort of have this moment where we feel overwhelmed and kind of want to pull in, right? Rather than do more, we want to pull in. That deflated loss of momentum, loss of motivation feeling. Now, my talk today is about something we can do about that. Something my team has learned that has helped us to address this feeling and the things that lead to it. But really, I want to step back first and talk about just that, which is like, why does this happen? Where is this feeling coming from? Because you might just think, well, your boss is the villain, right? She sends you all these new ideas, and she makes you feel overwhelmed. That's the problem. You need a new boss. But in my case, at least, that's really not the problem. I really like my boss, and I really think the fact that she has all these good ideas is a good thing, right? It's a good characteristic for a boss to have.
And so, I'm not going to blame her. And even if in your version of that story, whatever the details are in your version of that story, you feel like your boss really is the problem, what I'm going to suggest to you is that that is not a super helpful frame to put on the problem. Maybe you should think about this a little bit differently, because if that's your frame, the only real answer is to get a new boss. And sometimes that's not a good idea. Sometimes it's not possible. But generally, I think there's a more agentic way we can think about this, right? There's a way that kind of puts you more in the driver's seat. And that's to think about what is happening inside of you when that flood of messages comes in, right? Why is it that this flood of messages is giving us this deflated feeling where we've lost all of our momentum and motivation in the moment?
The root cause: FOMO
And so, that's what I want to talk about. I want to talk about, like, what is that cycle for you and how my team has learned to get out of it, and how I hope you can get out of it yourself. So, I'm going to propose that the thing that is happening inside of all of us in that moment is FOMO. Our old friend FOMO. A pretty common idea in American society, at least. But you might not have thought of this fear of missing out so much in the business context before, or in the professional context. But I think it really does apply, right? There's a way in which this really maps cleanly on to our experience. And that, you know, we're afraid of missing out on a promotion or a raise or a bonus, right? We're afraid of missing out on an opportunity to make our boss happy or make our team look good, right? So, that FOMO that is, you know, applied in the business setting is what's leading us to take on more than we should, right? To accept that overwhelming stack of projects. To try to roll with that because we're afraid of missing out on any one of them. And in doing so, we actually just lead ourselves to that deflated place, right? So, I'm proposing that FOMO is really the problem here.
And actually, it's even worse than that because in data science, I think we have a very specific acute version of this. That would be FOMO abstapa. That is the fear of missing out on awesome data science projects. So, this is specific to us, right? This is our room and this is our version of FOMO. And I think it's one that we have for some really good reasons, actually. Because in data science, we have this sort of unlimited universe of data that we could use, right? Everybody talks about it all the time. There's more data that we could possibly lay hands on. And then we have all of these awesome tools that we can use to do great things with all of that data. That's really what this conference is, right? This conference is about having the amazing tools and the great teams that allow us to do great things with this universe of data. That unlimited landscape makes FOMO really, really acute because you don't know if that next thing, if that next version of this project, that next model, that next run of this iterative process is going to get you to that awesome thing, right?
The beautifully produced video we saw this morning before the keynote talks about cleaning rivers or getting us to the moon, right? These are big, amazing things. So I don't say this glibly. I mean it genuinely. There are really, really important projects that we can do. But because of this unlimited landscape, we feel like we need to do more. And so that's what I'm talking about today, is that feeling that we feel like we need to do more and that leads us to take on more than we can and to feel overwhelmed and to feel deflated. So my suggestion is that we actually do less, right? It might feel like we need to do more, but let's do less.
And this is not a totally novel idea. You've probably come across this in some form or fashion before. There's a lot of research backing it up, a pretty robust literature around this idea. Book chapters, whole books, in fact. And of course, there is a Harvard Business Review article on exactly this. Want to be more productive? Try doing less. So simple. Thank you, HBR. I'm actually just going to wrap it up with a quote that I really like that I think sums all of this up pretty well, which is from Shane Parrish, who writes the awesome Farnam Street blog. He says, the most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word no, right? That's nice, right? But it's kind of deceptively simple and it makes it sound like all you have to do is say no, right? Just say no. It is, of course, not actually all that easy. Saying no is hard. We have this FOMO. We don't want to say no. And then you add this layer where your boss, or my boss in this case, is sending all of these ideas. So the person we have to say no to is the boss, right? This is exactly the person you don't want to say no to. So the rest of this is my story of how I learned to say no to the boss.
The most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word no, right?
The Eisenhower matrix
And that's when we get to the Eisenhower matrix. So the Eisenhower matrix is named for former President Dwight Eisenhower. And it's basically a task management tool. It's a pretty simple idea. It's been around for a long time, as you can probably tell. It's named for Dwight Eisenhower. So we have a task management tool in which we're rating our tasks on urgency and importance, right? So each task is getting a rating on each of these characteristics. And then we're just laying them out on a grid. Nothing so complicated about this. Imagine you have four tasks and they're rated like this. And so we would think about each task one by one. And it's going to help guide us to our next step for that task.
Task one here, very urgent and very important. This deserves your time and attention, right? This is where you will focus because it is both important enough to merit that, but also urgent enough that you need to do it. Now, task two is very urgent. Not all that important in the Eisenhower matrix. This is something you're going to delegate, right? This is something you're going to hand off to somebody else because it might not be important enough to merit your direct attention, but it's urgent. It needs to get done. So we will delegate it. Task three, not urgent or important. Bye-bye. Simple answer for this one in the Eisenhower matrix is that we cut it from our task list, right? This does not get anybody's attention. And task four, this is something that is important, but not super urgent. You're going to schedule this. So this gets built into your long-term plans. You build out work plans for it. You put it on your calendar. You make sure this happens because it's important, but it doesn't have to happen this moment. So you're scheduling it.
Adapting it: the Gonzalez matrix
So I came across this, and I thought, you know, this is really good. This is really going to help me. And I tried to implement it. I went through a few rounds of sort of trying to use this tool, and I kept tweaking it and adapting it until I felt like I'd gotten to something different, right? So I went from calling it the Eisenhower matrix to calling it the Gonzalez matrix. I named it for my boss, and I promise you she is thrilled with this honor. But like I said, I tweaked it. I adapted it enough that I felt like it was a little bit different. And so in this case, rather than urgency and importance, I'm focusing on effort and value, right? How effortful is something and how valuable is it? And rather than tasks, I'm thinking about projects, right? We've moved from the task level to the project level because that's what made most sense for my team. That's kind of how we work, and it made sense to keep and cut at the project level.
So here, high value, low effort project. This is great. This is where we focus. This is where we want our attention. And as many of these as we can get is really what we want, because we're producing a whole lot of value without putting in a whole lot of work. Project two is the one that we're scheduling in this version of this. Very effortful, but also very valuable, so worth it. Because it's more effortful, it's probably going to require iterations and collaboration, right? So you're building this into work plans, and you're really sort of establishing how this is going to go long term. Project three, high effort, low value, buh-bye. We don't want anything to do with project three, because it does not merit that level of effort. And project four is the one that we would maybe delegate, right? We think about handing this off to a junior member of the team, perhaps, because it's not so valuable that if it doesn't go well, it's going to really hurt the team. But it's also not so effortful that it's going to interfere with more important things, right? So this is a good learning ground for somebody who's coming up through the ranks, and so it could be one that you would delegate to them.
So at this point, I want to acknowledge something, which is that this is a pretty simple idea. This is a cost-benefit analysis set on a grid, right? There's nothing groundbreaking here. It's useful, and I will encourage you to use it or something like it, but I don't want to pretend like I have invented the wheel here, because I have not. This is a simple idea. So what's the point? Why am I telling you this? I think the really useful piece of this is that it is a hand chair. It is a hand chair because, to me, a hand chair is the definitive example of a conversation piece, right? I can't imagine walking into someone's home and seeing one of those and not having a conversation about it. And that's what I want you to think of when you see the Gonzalez Matrix, right, is all of the questions that pop into my mind when you see a hand chair, when I see a hand chair, I want you to have all of those questions, for all of that to come up when you think about your projects or your tasks laid out on a matrix, and then to have that conversation in a structured and productive and helpful way. So that's really what I'm trying to give you here, is the permission and encouragement and structure in which you can have a conversation that will be helpful for you and for your team, okay? Hand chairs.
Having the conversation
So I've been talking about a conversation, right? It's a conversation piece. That's how I want you to think about this. And that's true, but I want to acknowledge that some people use the word conversation as a euphemism for conflict, right? That happens. I'm a family therapist by training. I've seen that happen. So I want to acknowledge that conversations are not necessarily always easy or perfect. This is actually meant to prevent conflict in that we're trying to make explicit things that are implicit and lead to conflict. But again, I know it's not perfectly easy to do so, and so I want to acknowledge that.
And so here I'm going to give you some guidelines and set some expectations for what I think you can expect to see as you go through this. First, how should you talk about effort and value, right? What is the right way to have this conversation? At a very high level, I would say you want to be systematic, you want to be transparent, and you want to be open-minded. Systematic in that this is an iterative exercise. You're going to come back to this time and time again every time a new project pops up, maybe, or on some regular schedule. And you want to do it the same way as you go through it each time, because that consistency will allow the people on your team to have that sort of mental model, right? That prediction about how this is going to go each time, and to get better at guessing how projects are going to be rated on effort and value. So that's important to be systematic in that way.
Transparently also, because if we are driven by some internal bias, something that we're not acknowledging in our rating of effort and value, that's going to be clear to people. They're going to know that something is off between what you're saying, what you're describing about a particular project, and how you're rating it. And that gap that people are going to feel is going to quash the conversation, which is the opposite of what we want. And so you need to be transparent about, you know, I don't like working with project team X, so I'm going to rate this as not very valuable or super effortful. If you are not saying that aloud, people will notice, and it will sort of backfire on you. So just be transparent about why you're giving the ratings that you are, and hopefully within your team, it's safe to have that kind of transparency.
And then finally, open-mindedly, because I promise you people on your team know things about effort and value that you do not. You know, for instance, my boss is a great data person. She's a long way off in her career from being hands-on keyboard, right? She doesn't spend a whole lot of time actually working with data any longer. So the analysts on our team, they know a lot more about how effortful a particular analysis will be than she does at this point. Whereas, you know, me and the other analysts on the team will have a lot less view into how valuable something is at the organization level, right? So she has that and can bring that to us.
Thinking a little bit more rubber meets the road about effort and value, you want to assess the contextual factors, right? This is how you're going to really determine effort and value in a systematic way, is thinking about at the organization level, how well does a particular project line up with the mission and vision, right? Or does your team maybe have some competitive advantage, something that you do particularly well that's going to help you produce value and that you can use to sort of determine where a project falls on those attributes. Or maybe you have a key partner who is going to make a project really easy on you or make a particular project really valuable for your team, right? So thinking about that as a way to determine what's effortful and what's valuable.
And then finally, this has been a very data-like talk for a data science conference, but here I want to bring it in a little bit and just say that if you were tracking your time and your effort and your impact, the value that you're producing with a given project, you can use that to calibrate and go back over time in this iterative exercise to determine, were you right? Have you accurately predicted how effortful and valuable something will be? And where you're off, you can tweak. You can adjust how you're doing this to make yourself better at it.
Challenges and benefits
Next, challenges you can expect. Just a few things that I have seen. First, and some of you might be feeling this already, the resistance to dropping projects, right? As I said, I think there's some really good reasons we have this, but recognizing this resistance and tracking whether it's you or somebody else on the team or if it's a mix, tracking what kind of projects it seems to come up around is really going to be useful information. So that feeling of resistance to dropping a project is just worth paying attention to, and I don't have a magic answer for it other than to say if you see the pattern over time, you will start to recognize that you can do something about that pattern. I don't know what that is exactly, but it is the kind of paying attention to it, paying attention to the resistance, listening to it that will get you something valuable.
Different perspectives, as I said, different team members are going to see effort and value of a given project in different ways, and that's okay. That is useful, but you do need to be prepared to let people know if your decision is the final one, that needs to be clear going into this. If this is a democratic process in which everybody's vote counts the same, that needs to be clear, too. So there's not a right or wrong way to do it, but acknowledging that these differences are going to play out in one of a few ways is important to do ahead of time.
And then finally, the need for flexibility. People might want things that do not necessarily align with this, with this matrix, with this grid, and so being ready, if you have the flexibility to exercise it, to say, okay, we can spend time on this because you really want to, and that is okay, even though it doesn't line up necessarily with our ratings. Or if you can't, acknowledging that ahead of time, saying, no, we are too strapped, we need to focus in exactly the way that is prescribed. So being ready for that.
Finally, why? I know this is a little late for this in the talk, but I'd say how does this help? It helps in a few ways. One is it limits this everything is critical mindset, right? Everything might be critical, but not everything can be equally critical, and that's really what this exercise is about. This is really be how you say no to your boss, right? You ask them for help prioritizing so that you can focus. It also is going to get everybody rowing in the same direction, as they say. If you can align your team's perspective and clarify responsibilities, get everybody to think the same way about what's valuable, you will really, really produce a whole lot more than if you were all kind of spinning wheels independently and maybe even going different directions. So that is a really important benefit, and it's part of why doing less can actually make you more productive in addition to just feeling better.
It's part of why doing less can actually make you more productive in addition to just feeling better.
And then finally, this is a really good training ground for teaching junior folks to communicate and to, you know, be willing to voice their perspective on this stuff. We want our junior folks to get that kind of training, and as Andrew so beautifully spoke about, it is, you know, not born in any of us, so we need to give them the space to learn that, and this exercise is a great way to do that.
Wrapping up with a quick summary, here's what I am proposing to you, basically, is that you get that flood of messages in your inbox and you feel overwhelmed. I think it's actually a little bit different. I think there's a cognitive path here that goes from flood of messages to FOMO to too many projects to feeling overwhelmed, and that by recognizing the FOMO, putting it in its place with the Gonzalez matrix, and then culling projects and feeling better gets you actually from flood of messages more directly to this feeling of serenity now and productivity later. Thank you.