Weekly Wisdom #306 - The tradeoff we make whenever we take on something new

Depth vs. Breadth, Task Prioritization, Organizing Bookmarks & Product Manufacturers

​

Happy Monday!

The last couple months at work have been hectic for me.

Some good friends and colleagues left the company, which means that other people—myself included—have been covering their responsibilities.

Thankfully, I learned long ago how to prioritize well and manage my time, so it hasn't been too stressful.

But my manager asked me recently how things were going, and how I was managing my workload, and I summarized by saying: things are fine, but we're sacrificing depth.

In my context as a product manager in a software business, it means that we aren't doing the customer research we'd normally do to confirm that the problems we're solving are valuable.

Our design team is short-staffed too, and so we're also not doing the prototyping and iteration on our solutions that we'd normally do either.

In short, we're sacrificing depth for breadth.

And this happens all the time in our lives, not just in the world of work.

Any time we take on something else—we increase our breadth—we are sacrificing depth.

That may or may not matter, but it's a tradeoff that we should be making explicitly.

Where in your life are you trading depth for breadth?

Have a great week!

Graham

​

Links

📚 Book Notes: The Big Short - Michael Lewis - An awesome book. The Big Short tells the story of the 2008 financial crisis in such an entertaining form that only Michael Lewis could have written it.

His first book, Liar’s Poker, unwittingly sets the stage for this crisis, and so I would recommend reading the pair together, in order.

The story of the financial crisis is one of misaligned incentives, misunderstood risk, and the issues with our current financial system that allow such things to happen. Everyone who invests at all should read this book, in hopes of better understanding the players and risk that exist in investing.

📖 The Best Way to Get Things Done - Nick Maggiulli - A quick read about how you should think about prioritizing your tasks.

Maggiulli presents some options for day-to-day task management, but I think his overall point is the most valuable portion:

"The same thing happens with people when we get too busy. We don’t know what to do and we can crash. Unfortunately, that single crash can decrease productivity more than a slow day once in a while. That’s why your goal should be to be about 80%-85% utilized. You may have a less productive day here or there, but this slight inefficiency will prevent larger failures when fires inevitably pop up from time to time."

I consider one of my most valuable skills to be the ability to have high output for long periods of time, and that's largely because I've learned to balance my energy levels well and accept the occasional slow day without stressing about it.

📖 Organize Your Bookmarks with the PARA Method for Lightning Fast Web Browsing - Tiago Forte - I've used the PARA method for organizing the content I consume for years now, and it's worked well for me.

The best part is that the general method can be applied to whatever platform you use.

This article highlights bookmarks, but I used the same content organization method in Google Drive as I do in Instagram and Twitter.

10 Tweets

​A list of vetted manufacturers to make your own products​

​Why being able to be bad at things is a super power​

​Recommendation for what to watch: History Channel's "The Men Who Built America"​

​How to build a side business in 45 minutes​

--