This article is for you if you (or your team):
- have so much work in your queue that you never seem to get to the important stuff, the proactive stuff, the leadership things that only you can do
- have more ideas than time
- start new projects faster than you finish them, so your list gets longer but not shorter
- often feel behind, overwhelmed, swamped, underwater
- rarely feel "done" at the end of the day
- have tried working harder, and tried systems like Inbox Zero, GTD, backlog grooming, etc, and found they feel tidy but don't move the needle on overwhelm
Let’s try a thought experiment.
I’ve got a kiddie pool. I’m not that into water, and I know you love marbles, so I filled it with marbles. All kinds of marbles! They’re beautiful. Some are in your favorite color. Some have cool things inside of them. A few are made out of actual gold. One even has the only copy of your housekey embedded in it somehow (just go with it).
We’re old friends, and I’m feeling generous, so I’m going to give you whichever marbles you like—as long as they fit in that cup you’re holding. Go for it!
How do you choose? Literally what steps would you take?
Seriously, pause and have a think! Because this is what we have to do every time we plan our day. Or sort through emails. Or decide how to spend our time at work.
If you want to Inbox Zero it, you would pick up each marble one at a time, and decide what to do with it.
This method has some serious advantages. You definitely won’t miss a valuable marble, and if you get overwhelmed looking at the whole pool, it gives you a tractable starting place.
The downside of this sort of bottom-up method is that it’s breathtakingly expensive. Let’s say a kiddie pool is 150 gallons, and a gallon can hold 300 marbles, which gives us 45,000 marbles to consider. If we handle one marble per second, we’ll spend 12.5 hours sorting through the marbles. That's a whole waking day!
That’s time and energy we can’t spend on anything else: working on other things, sleeping, learning, seeing people we love, or just farting around.
Top-down approaches can be orders of magnitude faster without much loss in quality. They may be literally infinitely better, if they take you from “so bogged down you never finish” to “done.”
A top-down marble approach could look like:
- take a look at the pool, assess what’s there. Consider “how much time is this worth? How many marbles are gold? What else do I have planned today? How much do I enjoy sorting marbles? Is it snowing?" Decide this is worth one hour, but no more
- do a first pass, grabbing the marble with your housekey (after all, it’s the only copy) and all the solid gold marbles you see. Your bucket is 1/3 full
- do a second pass, grabbing the ones that are your favorite color. Your bucket is now 3/4 full
- do a third pass, grabbing any that catch your eye to round out your collection until the allocated hour expires
- you walk away, reasonably satisfied that you got a good-enough haul, and with 11.5 hours free to do anything you want!
Structurally, bottom-up approaches have several flaws.
They have a high minimum cost: if you have to process each marble individually, there’s no way to spend less than 12.5 hours on the task, even if a loose T-Rex is heading your way. You’re committing time to every single item, no matter how frivolous.
And these systems are not responsive to the contents of the pool. Bottom-up systems wouldn’t change much if the pool went from 3% to 99% gold marbles, but top-down ones sure would.
So why are bottom-up approaches so popular?
For one, they make compelling blog posts. They are like horoscopes: they are so generic that everyone sees the answer in them, and they let you sidestep the hard work of making your own decisions. Tempting!
For those with executive function challenges, breaking the problem into smaller chunks is a genuinely helpful tactic to get unstuck.
We also like them because they are soothing. If you worry about dropping balls, they guarantee every ball stays in the air, forever. Everything is tracked on a To Do list somewhere, so you’ll eventually get it all done. You just need some time to crank those widgets. (This is a seductive lie)
But their most subtle structural flaw that causes the most human misery is: they don’t force you to really grapple with your own mortality capacity.
Bottom-up systems are built on the (often unstated) assumption that each marble has merit, and therefore deserves individual consideration. But they don’t force you to consider the marble in relation to the other marbles, nor how full your bucket is already. They don’t have a built-in way to confront the fact that you can’t ever bring home every marble, and truly accept the fact that you’ll leave many perfectly wonderful marbles in the pool.
Because it’s true. Before you die, you won’t read every good book. You won’t see every Oscar-winning movie. You won’t visit every beautiful city. And you can't work on all your great ideas this month.
And it's making you miserable to pretend you can, because no matter how much you do, you’ll never feel "done." You'll always feel behind; like you're failing.
Bottom-up approaches bring us false comfort, letting us pretend we can do it all, someday, if we just follow that simple process that seems to work for all those bloggers.
But if you or your team are always underwater, or if you never feel "done" at the end of the day, you're far from alone. And I bet you a dollar that your practices are missing a top-down system that forces you to reckon with the time you actually have remaining.
This is easier said than done...want a Part 2?
This direction came out of my work with a coaching client, a CEO working to revamp his workflows to reduce that underwater feeling and free up time for higher-level activities. In digging in together, I realized this "top down vs bottom up" concept is a foundation of my workflow design (for both individuals and teams) but I’ve never seen it written up anywhere. Now it is!
There are a LOT more nuances and tactics to actually implementing this: how to actually get started, the hard parts you’ll definitely face, concrete examples from teams I've run and my coaching clients. But it's the end of the day and I have other responsibilities, so I'm going to take my own advice and approach this top down: publish this Part 1 now, and only continue in this direction if there's interest. If there's crickets, that's great, I saved lots of time!
So if you want me to write more about this, here are three ways to register your interest:
- subscribe here to get notified when I publish more articles (~monthly)
- vote for your favorite follow-up ideas in this tiny poll
- share this article with with people/groups who would be interested, that's always the strongest signal I've hit on something genuinely useful
Thanks for your input!