Getting out of thrash mode

If you’re in a growing organization, you will experience thrash mode. Thrash mode is when you are underwater. When you are too busy to do anything.

This post is not about prioritization. It’s about how to get unstuck when don’t have the capacity to get unstuck.

My first experience with thrashing

Thrashing is a term used in computer systems, where your resources are overcommitted. The computer system grinds to a halt, because it spends all of its time dealing with the fact that it is overcommitted.

Something analogous happens with humans.

I first noticed this when as a manager I took on more and more responsibilities. I had 12-13 direct reports, several teams, and six or seven projects. It all seemed like a lot of work, but manageable.

But all the sudden, it wasn’t manageable any more. Just keeping track of everything that was going consumed all my bandwidth. I had very little capacity to actually do very much work. Even worse, I didn’t have the bandwidth to actually make my situation better. I was stuck.

I thought this was a rare thing, but it kept happening to me. Over and over in my career, I’ve hit thrash mode and had to deal with it.

It’s now become so familiar I have a playbook I run. We’ll talk about that in a bit. But first:

Why to expect thrash mode

I view thrashing as inevitable. Why?

• Organizations are never 100% resilient. Managers will leave (permanently or temporarily), so someone will need to cover their responsibilities. Someone will get promoted, so their old responsibilities will need to be covered. These things happen.
• Hiring has lead time. So even when people realize they need to hire, they have to get approval, post the job, and find someone.
• Companies optimize to reduce costs, so they’ll try to get the most out of the team they have. The work will take all available capacity, and then go until things start to break down and there is a counterpressure.
• People are inefficient in new roles. When you move into a new role or position, you won’t be as efficient as you will be after you’re more experienced with it. This means you have less capacity and less time, and are more easily thrashed.

I expect it will happen to you many times in your career.

My playbook for thrash mode

Clear up some bandwidth

1. Clear your schedule. You have to do this pretty harshly. Cancel every meeting. Or at least start from the assumption you’ll cancel every meeting.
2. Cancel your 1-1s. When I said clear your schedule, I meant it. You may feel bad about it, but you’re not being useful right now. You need to clear up some bandwidth, or you’ll never get better.
3. Pretend you’re on vacation. These three top items are really emphasizing the same thing, you have to clear up some temporary bandwidth. So put on a vacation message in your email. Mark yourself out of office. Do what you need to to clear up some bandwidth.

Figure out what gives you more bandwidth

1. Make a list of anything that will structurally improve your situation. Usually this includes: delegation and giving away responsibilities, finishing up things that aren’t done, restructuring meetings run themselves, big pushes to get something vital done like hiring. Focus the list on things that free up future bandwidth.

2. Track less things. Decide on things you’re going to let go poorly. Decide on things you’re going to reset expectations for. All of these are things that give you more bandwidth to focus on your priorities.

3. Redefine big things into small things. Sometimes you can just decide not to do a big thing for now. Do a smaller version of it. Delay it. Sometimes you can decide to not complete something, but just make sure it’s always getting better.

4. Look at trends and structure. Sometimes I find that people miss that the long-term trend is running against them. Or that the structure of the situation is just not going to work. Sometimes you can use this freed up bandwidth to figure out how to untangle that situation. Do you need a new architecture, and new self-service approach? Sometimes you can figure out what the solution needs to look like, and then pitch a solution.

My toolchain for thinking about less

My current tooling of choice is Reclaim + Todoist. I don’t particularly care for Todoist, but use it because of its Reclaim integration.

What I do is enter my todo items in Todoist, with details about priority and deadlines. And then Reclaim puts these items on my calendar, to tell me when to work on them. As my schedule shifts, the items move around. And I can move them manually if I like.

There are two advantages to this setup:

• Once I enter something on my todo list, as long as I have the deadline and priority set correctly, I don’t have to worry about when it will happen.
• I can look at a page on Reclaim, and know any commitment I’ve made that I’m not able to fulfill, and reset expectations.

This is an enormous reduction in the number of things I have to think about every day.

I share this because I find it useful, but you may be able to find other tools that do the same thing. If you do look into Reclaim, please use my link for it, so I can get more free Reclaim time: Reclaim

Thank you

Image by Alexa from Pixabay