Throwing more time at it doesn’t make you a hero.
It doesn’t even make you a burn out martyr.
But it does make you an ineffective leader.
Take it from me, an old guy who discovered his limits the hard way. The reason old people hire young people is that they get a lot of energy without a lot of questions.
And eventually, every young person realises they can’t keep it up.
They hit a wall. Once. Twice, a few more times. And then they’re forced to make some decisions.
First, you’ll notice you start getting these mythical things called hangovers. You tell yourself it’s just a headache at first. No, it’s age catching up.
Then, you’ll notice hair where there isn’t supposed to be hair.
You might hit a birthday and think, holy shit, I’m twenty-blah already! and then you’ll forget about it by doing shots.
Another birthday will come again – too quickly – and you’ll say, holy shit, I just wasted the last year at a deadend job/awful band/idiot boyfriend that really didn’t do what it promised.
Then you have the better part of a decade of adult life behind you, and you can’t find the right wtf sticker in Snapchat to describe that feeling.
It’s about this time, usually approaching your Thirties, that you stop and look up for a second.
It’s like that weekend when you got sucked into that video game and all of a sudden it was Sunday night, you’re surrounded in dirty plates and smell like the kid in school that nobody talked to. Where did that time go?
You look at your life, and look back.
When I did this, I was 28, and realised I’d been chasing false dreams. I readjusted my goals, but with less energy now, I looked back wishing I hadn’t wasted my high-energy years by not sticking to what deeply mattered. And 7 years later I had to learn that lesson again .
So you learn this amazing new skill – saying no. Though fancy people call it prioritisation.
So why is this important for you now? At AI?
Agile has a very specific way to prioritise. You prioritise based on value for the customer, and difficulty or variability in delivery. And you prioritise weekly, as a team.
Now, the stupid hero in you, the one who likes to stay up until 4am every day because you wanted to say yes to every project that promised to tickle your ego, that hero will want to twist Agile priorities to include everything. You should say to that voice, “sit the fuck down and learn something.” Try to sound like Samuel L. Jackson. The L stands for Learn Something Mutherfucker.
The key skill to learn here is called de-scoping. Pretend it’s the night before the deadline, and you have to cut out all the nice-to-haves. You’re limiting the scope of the deliverable to the minimum that will work. Do that first, and ship it to the customer, then you can add more on later.
Eventually you get the hang of it, and when you plan each sprint, you get pretty good at choosing things that are realistic and worthwhile. You start to realise that all that extra stuff wasn’t so important, and that doing less stuff better goes a lot further.
Throwing more time at it isn’t heroic, it’s dangerous. Especially when everyone does that and creates a ton of expecatations and a web of interdependencies. If you fail, your team fails.
When you choose not to prioritise, you choose roll the dice with which important thing will fall apart.
Use your stand ups to learn to prioritise, to learn to say no or at least say later. Then you’ll find the time you invest has way bigger impact.
Or at least you’ll have the time to deal with that new hair. Eww.