Be Unbeatable at Your Job by Unlearning This Productivity Myth
“Give me a minute, I’m good. Give me an hour, I’m great. Give me six months, I’m unbeatable.” —Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith. There. That’s the Hannibal quote. Yeah. It’s from The A-Team. That’s my secret formula for peak productivity.
It’s also basically the mission statement of my career. I should put it on my website and on my LinkedIn. It’s too long for a hat, but I’d wear it. It drives everything I do—from the full-time positions I take, to the startups I found, to the consulting and advising I do for others.
And it speaks to something a lot of people miss. Productivity, where your job is concerned, isn’t about effort or efficiency or removing distractions. It’s about priorities and figuring out which actions to take.
Disclaimer: I loved The A-Team television series when I was a kid, and I’m watching it now with my college-bound son. I didn’t love the movie when it came out, but that statement hit me right between the eyes, and now the movie has grown on me and it’s in my top 20. Don’t judge. My top 20 is awesome. If enough people join my email list this week, I’ll publish it there.
Now, I’m not inventing fire by blathering on about priorities. The Hannibal quote gives you the framework to make talking about priorities more than just a platitude. Because whether you’re a new, young, low-level employee or a leader focused on the biggest of pictures, the temptation to engage in tasks that look like progress in the name of productivity is inescapable.
I almost want to say: If it feels like work, it’s wrong. If it feels like fun, it’s right. Don’t tell anyone I said that, though, or I’ll lose what little professional credibility I have left with corporate America. While I put a 30x on a startup’s revenue and the corporates are still arguing the definition of a “point” or the color of the T-shirt they’re sizing.
But if you don’t want to be replaced—by AI or otherwise—the productivity that’s going to save your bacon is not going to be a series of disconnected minutes that lead to disjointed outcomes. Those minutes look like progress, but they’re just aggregated minutes of busywork.
The Hannibal quote is why I won’t do the “advice drive-by,” where you and I get on a Zoom for a half hour and you tell me your ideas and I tell you … you know what, I’ve never figured out what I’m supposed to say there. Your ideas could be awesome or they could be terrible. I have both. All the time. It’s not for me to decide.
The Hannibal quote is also why I won’t be a formal adviser without at least a six-month contract. Anything less is help that looks like help, but it’s really not help. I need six months to make you unbeatable. Actually, I’ve gotten it down to six weeks but that’s with 25 years of experience at my back. You want to be unbeatable and be the MVP of the game? Give me the full six months.
These are the small tasks that are little movements forward, but most of them are not tasks that should fall into your purview. You need to be able to distinguish between those quick, one-minute tasks that are high-ROI, and those quick, one-minute tasks that are adding up to keep you marching toward failure.
One of my mentors refers to this as the “death spiral”—when you’re working too hard to think about examining and refining the work because you don’t want to lose the momentum and the revenue. But eventually, that work piles up and overwhelms you, keeping you from doing the things that will help you grow and be successful, until finally it all comes crashing down without warning.
I get it. A lot of us take an hour, maybe two or four, close our doors if we have them, turn off our phones, and bang out a task that takes our full attention and creativity. Coders long for these hours. A lot of us put a specific block of time on our calendars dedicated to these hours.
Here’s another dirty secret. During the day, sometimes several times during the day, I’ll take anywhere from 20-30 minutes to lie down on my couch and stare at the ceiling and figure out exactly what the **** I’m supposed to be doing. Then I get up and get extremely busy again.
I’m not the best at anything I do. I’m not great at a lot of things. And what’s more, I have a career that has bounced from sports to news to cars to farming and dozens of other areas of industry expertise before and after and in between.
Look, the days of siloed expertise are quickly coming to an end. CEOs and upper management are literally measuring how much an employee’s output is contributing to the top and bottom lines and using those numbers to make decisions. Decisions like how easily they can replace that expertise with AI, which claims to have all the expertise.
And what they’ll do is mandate some kind of methodology to accommodate that kind of measurement—in tech, it’s Agile, Scrum, and Jira—and they’ll turn six months back into a project that’s little more than a collection of hours that are filled with 60 disconnected tasks at a minute each. Then they put it on a Gantt chart and a roadmap and have an all-hands to get us to clap for it.
Those hours of forced creativity? They don’t work, not in any sense that isn’t just the completion of large chunks of death-spiral minutes. Instead, take the hour when you need the hour to think about the purpose and definition of what you’re doing. Because priorities.
Then spend those quick-hit minutes pushing real progress, whether it’s a couple of minutes to fire off an email that’s going to lead to big things, or the 15 to 20 minutes you sneak to push that code solution a little further.
This is part two of a loose three-part series on productivity and jobs. Here’s the first part. Please join my email list and you’ll get a heads-up when I publish the final part, which will be soon, but not next.