I recommend this 4 min exercise: Take your compensation sheet for last year, and calculate your average wage/hour. (For example, Salary divided by [49 weeks * X hours/week].)
This number will probably be higher than you had thought. Feel good about this. You present considerable future value to the organization.
The organization needs to get significant value from your average hourly wage, or else it becomes logical to find ways to get equal or better value from a lower wage, or non-human automation. No coasting! What “Good enough” in the past will fall short in the future.
Not every hour is equal, of course. Applying a power law function, you would expect about 2 weeks of the year, perhaps 100 hours, as the base for more than half your delivered value. Though it is difficult to consistently predict which 100 hours are best, you can focus on specific activities most likely to yield the highest value results.
Next time you think “it’s just 30 minutes” or “I can do that in a few days” do a recheck on your wages. This may make it easier to decline meetings, suggest someone else do some work, find another solution, etc. It’s also why solutions which provide lasting value and/or prevent problems in the future are worth your focused attention.
Meetings need to be productive! Ask “What’s worth this high number of salaried hours?” Good communication is worth extra effort up front because it scales better and reduces problems later on.
You can calculate this for your direct reports, too. This will help you consider their best assignments. You can also translate x amount of work into a dollar figure. I’ve been able to ask clients in the past, “Would you pay $10,000” for that solution? Because that’s about what the developer salaries will add up to.” You can have a good dialogue with better data.
All this is much easier to do when systems are working well, there is time/effort margin you can leverage, and relationships are healthy. With systems that are built on wet sand, overloaded people, and bitterness in a team, you’ll find you are drawn into a downward spiral of focus on the less productive and less valuable work.
Calculating Your Value
