No idea. I learned it from a manager who went into a management course, was taught it and not even a week later was back in full reactive mode treating any new thing coming in as Urgent Important even when non-urgent or at least non-important, as she had been doing before going to that course.
Let’s just say she was a lousy manager.
Well, as joel_feila pointed out, people tend to be forced to, at the very least, work in the Urgent and Important quadrant because that’s what one has to give top priority to, no matter what (and part of the work of triaging the demands on one’s time is to make sure one doesn’t miss or delay things from that quadrant because of too many Non Important stuff interrupting one’s work).
However you want to try and get yourself in a situation were Non-Urgent Important stuff is what you do most, because amongst other things by tacking potential problems in Important domains before they become Urgent, you have a lot more space to do it properly, something which in turn avoids further problems due to one’s half-arsed solutions for Urgent not working anymore of breaking easilly when touched.
In summary, Non-Urgent Important is the ideal, Urgent Important is what gets top priority, Non-Important is what you do when there’s nothing in the other 2 quadrants to do.
The whole point of triaging incoming demands and doing all you can to subtly train the people upstream who are already informed of the importance and urgency of something to only get it to you in a way that interrupts your work if those things are indeed urgent, is exactly to create and maintain the space that lets you address most things in the Non-Urgent Important quadrant before they transit into the Urgent Important one.
If you don’t have “thinking things through” and “maintenance/tweaking” time you’re going to get a lot more fires and a lot more of the fires which start small grow into full-blown fires before you spot them, all of which just turns into a feedback cycle were all that urgent firefighting means you don’t have time for preparation, prevention and detection, which in turn creates more fires and more small fires growing hence you have to spend more time in urgent firefighting.
To be honest, in my entire career I have never managed to, in a specific job, pull out from a “constant urgent firefighting mode” to a “mostly steady mode of work with an urgent fire having to be fought once in a while”: making it happen has always been a case of me starting a new job and bringing in best practices from the start, so that by the time I’m finished with learning the environment, and integrating with a new team, and am working full speed, I’m keeping things under control. Doing it from the start of a new job is often possible because in my area (Software Engineering) people aren’t expected to hit the ground running at full speed (since you have to learn the installed codebase and integrate with the team) so there’s a lot of leway when starting a new job which you can use to set expectations from the start and to justify the extra time it takes to actually get a decent work process in place.
As I’ve written somewhere else, I’ve actually managed to bring over and use the Dutch style of working in a British Finance environment (which is hectic and prone to shoot-from-the-hip management and firefighting) to yield better results (faster and more predicable deliveries, were the work I made was better matched to user needs and had fewer bugs) than most of my colleagues and did all this working 8h/day rather than the 10h+/day they did.
IMHO, the process works, and I believe that’s the merit of the process rather than being a “me” thing.
From what I’ve observed when living in the UK and now that I’m living in Portugal, it’s shit management practices all the way up, with the politicians at the top being the worst managers of the lot.
But yeah, I can empathise with being in an work place were no matter what you do to try and manage your time to deliver your best (as the years went by in my career, I’ve learned various professional occupations which are are part of the “feed-in” for the main work I do, to quite an advanced level, merely as a means to improve my performance at delivering the right results at the right time, which is taking efficiency improving to quiet an extreme level), it just feels that all levels all the way up are working against you and that you’re just rowing against the current all the time.
Fortunatelly for me, I can just change employers and even countries if I think the overall work conditions are shit and I will never be able to properly manage my time, though I’ve noticed that plenty of medical professionals can’t, plus in my experience, when you’re snowed in by out of control inflows of work, you don’t generally have the energy to even start planning your way out of it.
That said, having moved from The Netherlands (whose management and work culture is generally very good) and into Finance in the UK (which is a pretty hectic and ill organised “shoot from the hip” environment), it’s perfectly possible to apply the techniques of highly organised and well managed environments in disorganised ones to produce superior results (in speed, quality and predictability of delivery timings) to those of everybody else there.
That said, I’m talking about Software Engineering here, which is a Logic+Creative area were you can “backup your patient” before you do something in case you make a mistake, unlike Medicine (though in Finance things can get “interesting” - read millions of dollars can be lost - if your code starts getting used by Traders and it’s not working properly). On the other hand one would expect that in Medicine, being properly rested in order to reduce the risk of mistakes is even more important.
I did that when I started (I am, modesty on the side, a natural at what I do for work) and the result was that I became the top problem-solver of my team and over time I had more and more load from people bringing me their problems whilst still being expected to do the formally allocated work, with the end result that when I left that job I was working very long hours, always tired and my productivity had plummeted.
What was happenning there was that, because of me always saying “yes, I’ll help you” with zero pushback, I became the easiest path for people in my team to quickly solve their problems, and that was including problems they could solve themselves. Also my effectiveness at doing anything fell massivelly because whatever I was doing, in the middle of it I would be interrupted (which has quite the cognitive cost due to interruption of the mental state of Flow and “mental context switching”) and if I immediatelly went into solving that new problem I would likely be interrupted at that too (leading to multiple things hanging half-way to done and making my delivery speed overall worse), and even if I wasn’t interrupted serving the latest interruption the mere “stop this task, do something else equally complex, then get back to the original task” increased the probability of mistakes in the original task because of the possibility of losing track of important details of the work I was doing in it.
Human beings are naturally lazy (myself included) and if, because you offer no pushback, coming to you with any problem is easier and faster than trying to figure it out themselves, people will tend come to you with their problems before properly after little or no effort to solve it themselves, which might be doable (though not good for them or for you) if it’s only one or two people, but not when it’s more than that.
If only to avoid becoming the minimum-effort-path for everybody else and/or having your efficiency drop because of not enough single-task focus and too much context switching (and the entire team’s efficiency fall compared to them solving all the problem they can solve themselves), you have to do some pushing back.
You aren’t hired to do the work of others and neither are you hired to underperform because you’re in constant firefighting mode even for things which are unimportant or not really burning, so immediate response to any demand on your time from somebody else is pretty much the most amateurish, least professional way to do your work for anybody which is not a junior-level professional.
That said, if you’re lucky enough to be in a situation were you empowering others to work better is recognized and desired or, even better, you’re expected to and have officially time to be a mentor, then you can relax the pushing back: you still should triage the urgency of your response to things to match their actual urgency - that’s just basic competence at organising your time and work - but you can now when approached by somebody with a problem dedicate some time to teach people to help themselves (literally have them sit down and explain how to diagnose and fix it whilst they do it themselves) both so that they don’t constantly come you with simple problems (which isn’t really the value added stuff you’re being paid a Senior level professional cost to do) and for them to grow as professionals, and if you’re mentoring you’ll want to go further and periodically sit with the junior types and do overviews of things or help them out in planning how to tackle a complex thing they’re about to start.
Still, in all this, you have to plan your time and triage access to you time based on urgency and importance in order to mantain good performance and actually deliver results in a predictable way, So as to best fits the needs of your employer: for any employee beyond junior level, good time management (which includes the priority of your response to queries and problems match the importance and real urgence of them) is just simple professional competence and since the triaging itself is a time cost (quite a big one if it breaks you out of Flow and forces a mental context switch), you want it done in the most effective way as possible and by the more well informed about the important and urgency of the situation as possible, which means most of it should be done upstream and before getting to you.
Well, I’m sorry for you guys to have to work under the worst of American management culture (the baseline of which, compared to Northern Europe and Scandinavia, is pretty bad).
Coming from a Southern Europe country and having worked in a couple of countries including Northern European ones, it’s my experience that a lot of those abusive work practices you see in Anglo-Saxon and Southern European management cultures are neither needed nor efficient, and instead are just the product of bad organisation (read: incompetent management) and employees enduring it under the mistaken assumption that “that’s just the way things are”/“there is no other option” because they’ve never worked in an environment with proper management.
If there is one thing that going to Northern Europe and working there taught me is that those things are almost never needed and most definitelly are not universally the way things are.
The only surprise here is that it took them this long to do it.
No you do not.
You don’t want an incredibly tired person prescribing treatment for you or, worse, operating on you, unless you have some kind of death wish.
You want a proper call rota with the doctor “on call” and only the doctor “on call” to have their work phone ON and be available during their on-call hours.
That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn’t: it’s you and all other people who think like you (or if they start by not thinking like you, they’ll change their minds when they see others who do think like that get prompt service whilst they themselves do they not).
That logic just leads to people who if they make a mistake can kill you or give you a problem for life (by prescribing your the wrong medicine or, worse, cutting the wrong thing whilst operating) being very tired and hence way more likely to make mistakes.
Having a single professional having to be on call 24/7 is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation - fine if only one or two people used that availability only for very urgent problems, a disgrace for everybody when lots of people innevitably use that availability for any shitty shit little thing.
I’ve been activelly managing my mobile phone pretty much like that since the 90s because after getting my first mobile phone I quickly figured out that if allowed to the thing just turned into a source of near-constant urgent non-essential alerts, in other words, unnecessary stress.
Decades ago, I learned about the whole 4 quadrants thing in management: https://www.testprepchampions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4quadrantstimemanagement-1024x768.jpg
You’re supposed to work mostly in the “Important Non-Urgent” quadrant as much as possible and mobile phones if not properly managed constantly pull you to the “Not Important, Not Urgent” which is the worst quadrant to be working in.
In this perspective the problem with mobile phones (and e-mail also to a great extent have a similar problem) is that all notifications/calls look equally important from the outside, so you have to stop doing what you’re doing to check them because they might actually be stuff from the “Important and Urgent” quadrant, but unless you tightly manage it, most of them are not, not least because, if you push back on it hard the people who constantly work in the “Non-Important, Non-Urgent” quadrant (i.e. those who are bad at managing their own time) will make that your problem too.
So what do I do to manage it so that my phone is not a source of stress:
TL;DR - Triage things so that you’re as much as possible spend your time doing Important Non-Urgent things (You go after the non-urgent to reduce the number of things that through doing nothing about it whilst they’re not urgent, go from potential problem into “Oh, shit everything is burning!”). Activelly segregate contact channels based on the triaged level of subjects. Train your colleagues from the start to expect just that (i.e. that e-mails don’t promptly get responded) and always push back from the start against misuse of contact channels (i.e. non-urgent non-important stuff coming via phone gets a response along the lines of “I’m busy with more important stuff, so send me an e-mail about that and I’ll look into it when I have the time”), so that essentially other people will be triaging that stuff for you before they even contact you. As for smartphone Apps, by default assume that notification sending is driven by Marketing considerations of the maker of that app and hence are neither important nor urgent (personally I default to notifications OFF for most apps).
That’s a good point and I need to start considering that option in any future upgrades.
As it so happens around a decade ago there was period when they tried to make Graphics Cards more energy efficient rather than just more powerful, so for example the GTX 1050 Ti which came out in 2017 had a TDP of 75W.
Of course, people had to actually “sacrifice” themselves by not having 200 fps @ 4K in order to use a lower TDP card.
(Curiously your 300W GTX780 had all of 21% more performance than my 75W GTX1050 Ti).
Recently I upgraded my graphics card and again chose based on, amongst other things TDP, and my new one (whose model I don’t remember right now) has a TDP of 120W (I looked really hard and you can’t find anything decent with a 75W TDP) and, of course, it will never give me top of the range performance when playing games (as it so happens it’s mostly Terraria at the moment, so “top of the range” graphics performance would be an incredible waste for it) as I could get from something 4x the price and power consumption.
When I was looking around for that upgrade there were lots of higher performance cards around the 250W TDP mark.
All this to say that people chosing 300W+ cards can only blame themselves for having deprioritized power consumption so much in their choice often to the point of running a space heater with jet-engine-level noise from their cooling fans in order to get an extra performance bump that they can’t actually notice on a blind test.
Even in the Working From Home age, that content is Not Suitable For Work because the blood frequenty rushing away from one’s brain isn’t good for productivity.
Yeah, GoGo need to improve their Linux support since at the moment they seem to just “go along with it” without putting any effort into it
That said, with stuff like Lutris (can only speak of that since I never used Heroic) which can use GoG’s API to access your account and download games and has GoG-specific install scripts, it’s also a reasonably seamless experience to game in Linux from GoG and none of it is tied to a proprietary vendor solution like Steam + Proton, so it’s a lot more flexible and friendly for those who want to do their own tweaking - for example all my games in Lutris run sandboxed using firejail for extra security and blocking network access, but I can’t do that for Steam.
GoG is pretty much a totally open solution (you need not use their API and can just download an offline installer and install it however you see fit) whilst Steam is tracking and controlling your installs, game launching and in some cases game playing, so that means gaming with Steam is much more tightly coupled to both their code and their servers and thus Steam is always going to be more ill-fitted to the traditional hacker ethos in Linux than GoG.
Finally, keep in mind that Steam’s enhanced Linux support is just a natural consequence of their strategy of trying to protect themselves from any Microsoft funny business with Windows by creating their own Windows-independent ecosystem, with Linux being a natural shortcut to do so cheaply.
Funilly enough as somebody who has been using the Internet since being a working class teen in a poor European nation in the early 90s and thus knowing all about pirating, GoG is what made me stop pirating games (and even after they came up with GoG Galaxy I still kept downloading offline installers, plus my purchases in Steam have always been pretty limited in comparison to those in GoG exactly because in Steam my access to install a game can be removed at any time) whilst things like Netflix never stopped my pirating of Movies and TV-Series exactly because it was a streaming service which I would have to pay forever to maintain access to the Films and Series I liked rather than a Film and Series store were I could buy to keep (and, adding to this, during the peak period of VHS tapes and DVDs I actually did buy a lot of physical media).
Anecdotal, I know, but it’s funny that my behaviour over the years almost perfect matches what you describe.
Yeah, that stuff it’s pretty hard to learn and it’s worse when you’ve never worked in an environment where people in general tend to practice good time management - a lot of things you would normally not risk doing because they look like time wasting turn out to be the key to saving time, avoid wasted work (i.e. time wasted) and avoid problems later (which in turn, also means time when you’re the one who has to fix them), but only after you’ve seen it in action can you know for sure that such things will in overall save you time (and can actually justify spending time doing them to others because you’ve seen them actually work).
I was lucky that after 2 years working, having chosen to leave my country I ended up in The Netherlands, and the Dutch are very good at working in an efficient and organized way that properly respects work-life balance, so I learned a lot from them and watching and learning how they worked and what resulted of working that way gave me a whole new perspective into the work practices from my first job which I until then though were “the way everybody works in this area”.