Early last year, I was stressed out because my managers in one office were stretched too thing. Early this year, I was stressed out because I had more managers than I knew what to do with.
I have teams that are overwhelmed with work. Just the projects we’ve identified today will keep them busy for the next year, forget about any new ideas we think of or emergencies that happen. Then there are other teams that are responsible for products that are active, but they’re scrambling to find useful things to do.
Some days I feel like I have nothing to do. Some days I feel like I have everything to do.
We seem trapped between two equally unpleasant choices: being overwhelmed or existential uncertainty. In none of these situations is there balance, even though we want it.
In struggling with these situations, I’ve realized that the balance I wished for is an unachievable fantasy. To achieve it means that three factors, our work rate, our backlog, and our idea generation rate, should be, well, balanced. Our backlog should be big enough to buffer hiccups but not so big as to impose excess pressure to work it down. The work rate should closely mirror the idea generation rate. Only it doesn’t work that way.
Work gets done in a lumpy, irregular fashion. The items are of varying sizes and complexity. The team’s productivity fluctuates with people’s moods, energy levels, absences, and the mix of different types of work. And then there’s idea generation, which defies predictability and consistency.
Our control over these factors is crude and incomplete. At best we have control over the distribution of values over time, but their values at any given moment are basically random and independent of each other. Viewed in that light, it’s easy to see why balance almost never happens. Just combining the probabilities makes it evident that balance is improbable. It’s not quite impossible, but for practical purposes, we should treat it that way.
Don’t strive for something that is so hard to achieve and so fragile and temporary when it is achieved. Don’t aim for balance. Aim for being marginally overwhelmed but still maintaining your sanity. It is better to be needed too much than too little. Just don’t be need too too much.