some weird tricks for working faster
Hi. FYI, I’ll be cross-posting to my blog karlyang.net, where you can find other writing that won’t appear on Substack.
The basic theory here is that, most of the time, dependencies slow you down. There are ways to ac/decelerate the process that are problem-agnostic. Usually, you are communicating back and forth with other people until you have reached some form of mutually acceptable agreement, and there are ways to do that faster.
A lot of these tactics get 0.01% of the project done a few hours or days faster, but they really add up. Taking hours off of each sub-chunk of the core dependency of a giant project can make the whole thing go way faster.
Summary
Time and attention are precious. Fewer cycles means faster resolution. Faster cycles also means faster resolution.
Communicating in full chunks allows people to process your request instead of following up for clarification
Do the extra work to communicate clearly and with empathy
Spoon feed requests and to make them happen faster
Align to their schedule to reduce time between cycles
Accelerate tempo with interruptions
Minimize round trips with full chunks
This is the same principle as not sending a single Slack message saying "hi". Every time someone gets around to replying to you, you are magically at the top of their queue for that period of time
Give enough information that the other person can resolve your request immediately. For example, don't say "I'm mostly free Tuesday afternoon", say "I'm free 1-4pm Tuesday".
Give people detail on whether you've actually done the thing or not. Instead of "I can reach out to the vendor", you can say "Unless you tell me otherwise, I will reach out to the vendor about X by EOD and cc you so you know it's done".
Basic stuff, like making sure someone has access to a doc when you share it with them, you attached everything, you named files clearly, etc.
Try to have the correct people in a meeting or on an email chain so that you don't have to revisit. There is value in a group sitting together and seeing all the other people nod.
People are busy. Do the work to be clear.
Different companies have different communication cultures. But most of the time, you will be rewarded for communicating clearly, and making it easy for other people to understand (and do) what you are requesting.
Be clear (at least with yourself) about what outcome you want in a given interaction. A lot of people just show up to meetings (and life, tbh) without intention, yet they are surprised their goals were not met.
Imagine the other person is distracted, sleep deprived, and thinking about lunch and/or not getting fired. Chances are those things are true.
Context matters - remember that while you might have been thinking about a particular thing for the last few hours, somebody else has probably been worrying about something else.
Spoon feed to prevent choking
The more you can spoon feed something (e.g., "please send an email containing the below paragraph to these 3 investors so they can help with introductions"), the more you will get what you want quickly.
It takes activation energy, time, and attention for someone to compose an introduction email, to go figure out how to run a workflow, or dig into a tool they use once a month and find an approve button.
Also, the longer it takes them to do the thing you're asking them to do, the more likely it is they'll get distracted by something like reading a really overly long sentence and/or get interrupted by a slack message or an email or a and forget what was going on at the beginning.
Keep the ball in their court.
People (including you) have rhythms to their work. If you work within or adapt your rhythms to whoever you're working with, you can make things go faster. The cost is usually disrupting your own rhythm.
Reply to messages immediately as you see them. You can often get a couple rounds of communication in. If you wait, they might get into a meeting and you won't hear from them for hours.
One way to get things moving on a daily cadence is to make sure the ball is always in someone else's court at the end of each day.
Avoid getting buried. If you send an email on a Saturday, your email might get buried when they check their email on Monday, and they won't get to it until 4PM. If you schedule send it at 9AM, they might reply at 9:05AM.
If you're dealing with time zones, work with their rhythm. Let's say you're working with a partner in India (IST), and you're in San Francisco (PT). If you send an email at midnight PT (12:30PM IST) as you're going to sleep, they might reply to you by 2AM PT (2:30PM IST) . If you reply at 9AM PT (9:30PM IST), their day is already over, and they won't get to you until the next morning. But if you get up briefly to reply at 3AM PT (3PM IST), you can often get in an extra round of back and forth.1
Pick up the damn phone
You're probably a millennial or gen z who has some sort of vague phone anxiety. Get over it. If there's something you (likely both) care about, and someone has given you their phone number, you have the magical ability and usually have explicit permission to interrupt them. You are allowed to call them, they are allowed to not pick up, and you will get things done faster.
A few important caveats:
This does break focus for the receiver, so use it judiciously. You can also send a slack saying "hey can you jump on a call, want to talk about X".
When a call could've been an email, and especially when a call scheduled for next week could've been an email sent today, send the email.
This is especially true when choosing between email today and call next week.
Keep driving things forward
You're allowed to follow up on things. You're allowed to follow up weekly or daily or hourly depending on your own judgement.
You can also backchannel things, play good-cop-bad-cop, ask your CEO to send angry emails to slow partners, etc.
You can ask for (un)reasonable timelines, even if they are rejected. Sometimes you can demand them.
While doing this, you should generally be polite but firm. I've seen other techniques work, but they're off-brand for me and so I rarely use them.
Warnings and conclusion
Most of these tactics are computationally expensive on your end. You are working 2x harder to go 4x faster. This is not "leverage".
Communicating in full chunks allows people to process your request instead of following up for clarification
Do the extra work to communicate clearly and with empathy
Spoon feed requests and to make them happen faster
Align to their schedule to reduce time between cycles
Accelerate tempo with interruptions
For things you want people to understand, repeat yourself, a lot.
Should have provided a trigger warning about the solo “hi” Slack message 😂
I agree with all of this (but still am working on it).
I would note that, as someone recovering from consultant mode, clarity and focus in text are now available as often-good-enough outputs of LLMs. There's a lot of leverage in making your default response to, "I'm too tired to write this more clearly" be "I'll ask chatGPT to draft it, and I can tweak and send" rather than "I guess I'll do it tomorrow."