All,

For the last month or two I’ve been reading a few pages of “Poor Charlie’s Almanac” every day, the wisdom of Warren Buffet’s (arguably even more worldly wise) side kick Charlie Munger. Charlie is still going strong at 98 years old. 

One of my personal habits is to really zone in and focus on systematic thinking time when times are tough, because with fear, upheaval, market collapse, etc, comes both existential risk and great opportunity. It pays to be paying attention. There is no better way to get tuned in than by leveraging the thought process of someone infinitely wiser than yourself. 

A few people have reached out to me for advice on handling multiple priorities. You know the feeling, 101 things that all need done, finite time and resource, the pressure is weighing you down, gridlock. 

It’s hard to beat the advice on how to prioritise Warrant Buffet has been giving top investors and executives for 60 years… 

• Step one, write down a list of your top 20 priorities for a particular week, month, year, or career. 
• Step two, sort the list so the top 4 priorities are at the top. 
• Step three, delete the bottom 16. Boom.. then focus on the 4. 

The James Clear blog linked below takes this approach a step further. In this case, rather than deleting the bottom items Buffet recommended the executive save them as an “avoid at all costs list”, projects not to be touched until the first four* are fully killed off. 

Executives at all levels really struggle with this principle not just in managing their own time, but in setting priorities for their teams. The best way to make sure you don’t achieve the things that really matter is to waste grey cell cycles and focus on things that seem important but in reality don’t matter quite so much. 

I’ve always believed that even more ruthless prioritisation is required in deep IP activities like software development. Activities where it can take hours, days or weeks to get “into” a problem, then maybe a only a few hours to solve the problem. Context switching is terminal in this sort of work. 

My advice to one manager during the week was to forget about the bottom 18 and focus on a maximum of two key priorities. 

Jon Lambert really drove this philosophy home to me. He worked for (sector) legendary TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadive when he was a public company CFO. Vivek insisted every executive could give a comprehensive update on their “Top 3” things on the spot any time he asked. The exec’s top 3 needed to align with what Vivek thought their top 3 should be also. Hence the origin of the “Top 3” status we use widely in customer facing meeting minutes, Monday boards, Jira tickets and the like. 

I’m a lot easier to work for than Vivek.. that said I always know what I deem my (& the firm’s) top 3 and the current status, same for most executives whether they realise it or not. 

At some point or other most people in the exec team have got a rather sharp response from me of the form “like why are you even working on that?”.. (*head scratch*) A polite way of saying not only should the issue not be anywhere close to that particular execs top 3 or 4 priorities, but that the distraction caused poses a danger not just to her priority list, but to everyone else who gets sucked it. 

There is no bigger distraction than a project that is fun, interesting, controversial even, but unimportant, or as Buffet would argue, important, but not just as important. 

Hope this helps. 

Cheers,

Danny

— 

* this blog used 25/5 whereas every other time I’ve read about it its 20/4. 

https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Charlie’s_Almanack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivek_Ranadivé