Michael Santarcangelo

Becoming a better communicator makes us a better audience.

Learning to craft useful messages teaches us to read the situation.

What fits in your week? Knowledge work needs time to work. So how do we allocate the limited time and energy we have? I use a model called 20/60/20 with my clients to help us decide where our time and energy go. Here's what it looks like in a forty-hour week. Protect 20% for high-value project work, about 8 hours. High-value work is where we can produce an oversized benefit versus the cost, in the focused time we have. It's a blend of doing good work and finishing it. I recommend scheduling this as three three-hour blocks, usually on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And yes, that's 9 hours on the calendar for the math nerds, but in practice, that generally means 6–8 hours of focus each week. For me, that's after the first cup of coffee kicks in, but before the residue of the day builds. That window tends to work for others I work with, too. The point is to give the work that needs our best thinking the time when we can bring it. 60%, roughly 24 hours, goes to operating. Some call it RTB (run the business) or KTLO (keep the lights on). Call it whatever you like. It's where the bulk of our work gets done. Broken up, it's about 4–5 hours a day to handle meetings, status reports, upgrades, and the more routine work and support people count on us for. The key here is energy. While these actions are important (and sometimes urgent), they don't generally demand our best energy. I tend to slot these in for later in the morning and afternoons. The remaining 20% is slack time. No, not for Slack, Teams, or other chats. It's time we deliberately keep open to handle what comes up. This works out to about 1–2 hours each day. It includes time to get from one meeting to the next, give our brains time to reset, and handle the things we didn't anticipate. While we can't always plan for the chaos itself, we can protect time to deal with it. I like printing out a calendar and sketching the boxes by hand, each with a different color. Helps me see what the week looks like, and what fits where. More importantly, it helps me see what doesn't fit. Which forces important questions about where we allocate our time and attention. Instead of trying to take on all the projects, we start to realize three focused sessions a week let us advance 1–2, no more than three. Or we see we have more operational demands than time, creating a new problem to solve. Over time, we start to see our work differently. When faced with new demands, we start to ask where it fits, or what we need to say no to.

Progress reveals pathway.

We don't need to see the whole path to figure out our Best Next Step.

Why renew if we can’t see the benefit? “Hey, you think I can get a two-week extension?” Turns out a software renewal “landed” on my colleague’s plate two days before the current agreement expired. They needed more time to understand and build the case to send up the chain. “Some do, especially if the renewal is important to them. What’s it do?” The company had been using the tool for a couple of years. My colleague wasn’t part of the purchase and didn’t use it daily. To the best of their recollection, it fired off maybe once in the last two years. Pushing deeper, we weren’t sure whether another security tool they already use would have caught it anyway. So I asked what benefit the company got from the tool. They didn’t know. Value = benefits − costs. When it’s time for renewal, the price is clear. That’s the amount going on the purchase order. Costs include what it takes to run the tool. How much time, how much energy, across how many people? Hard to see when it’s not in your daily purview. I asked if they’d heard from the vendor. “Not yet.” So I asked, “If the vendor can’t show the benefit, why is it on you to?” Astute vendors see how their solution works across multiple clients. What do they see that we don’t yet? That helps us answer “What did the tool allow us to do that we couldn’t do otherwise?” Once we can see the benefit, we can show it to the person making the renewal decision, weighed against the full cost. My colleague needed more time to make the case for renewal. Maybe what they’d have to show at the end of those two weeks was a good reason to let it go.

Familiarity can feel like competence.

When questions look like answers “Hey! If you have all the answers already written down, then why do you keep asking us so many questions?” That’s how the second part of the day opened. We had just gotten back from lunch, and while my laptop was properly secured and protected, I evidently left my handwritten notes at my seat. So when the six of us shuffled back into the little conference room with the huge whiteboard, someone noticed. What they saw on the pages looked like answers. Maybe the answer. To me, they were things to explore. Answers I desired, but didn’t have yet. During the morning session, I asked a lot of questions. We took turns at the whiteboard, passing the marker around. We were actively exploring and figuring things out. I did what I do. I listened. And I used my pen and paper to capture what I heard, what I didn’t hear, and what it prompted me to think about. Phrases, questions, boxes, arrows, the whole bit. I like to think with a pen in my hand. To me it’s a less elegant version of the beautiful sketchnotes I sometimes aspire to. It helps me see the situation differently, find connections, and figure things out. I don’t hide my notes. Not then, not now. When people see them, I’m always happy to share. But on that day, the sharing came a little early. I think we took my notes to the copy machine so each person could have a copy. Then we sat back down and reviewed the morning session, working through my notes. They saw how I was thinking about the situation and where I thought we needed to focus. We did. The afternoon was full of energy, drawings, and dialogue. In the end, we found the answers they were looking for. I don’t recall anymore if what I sketched was “the answer,” or just fuel. Sometimes it’s both.

What we get used to changes what we accept.

We can keep working the plan after the plan stops fitting the work.

The finished work can hide the effort it took to deliver it.

The downside of knowing the right answer When we build our career in technology, knowing the right answer gets rewarded. But we start not knowing the right answer. We find ourselves in stressful situations where we need something to work. We struggle through testing, reading, asking, and troubleshooting. Eventually it works. Hopefully in time. While we try to avoid those high stress, high profile failures, tech gives us a lot of challenges to learn from. Over time, we develop the sense of knowing where to look, what to ask, and what’s happening. We embrace the craft of technology. Our experience informs us. When asked, we know the right answer. Then something interesting happens. The more we get known for knowing the right answer, the more people look to us to offer the right answer. It feels good for us, and it works for them. We offer what we know, while inadvertently hiding what it took to figure it out. I’ve noticed that for a lot of people, knowing the right answer becomes part of our identity. The downside of identifying as the person who knows the right answer is the silent fear of not knowing. We figure that not knowing, or worse, admitting we don’t know, somehow comes across as weak. We don’t want to let people down. So someone asks a question, expecting us to know. We don’t immediately know, but then we don’t want to look like an idiot, either. Because we base their trust in us on knowing the right answer. The voice in our head reminds us we know how to figure it out, if only we had more time. We’re still willing to work through what we don’t know. We just don’t want anyone else to know we’re figuring it out. We didn’t start by knowing the right answer. We earned that ability by being willing to find out. When did not knowing become something we needed to hide?

Relying on someone else to explain the value of the work doesn’t develop our own ability to explain it.

The reward for solving problems There’s no shortage of problems to solve. Everywhere we turn, there’s a problem. Sometimes it feels like all we’re doing is solving problems. What’s the reward for solving problems? More problems to solve. Sounds a bit like Groundhog Day, but it’s different. Much of our growth, contribution, and recognition is a result of the problems we solve. As we get better at solving problems, we tend to face harder, more complex problems. Facing harder challenges is a positive signal, a sign that we’re making progress. There is one trap. Solving the same problems over and over again. This tends to happen when there are so many problems to solve, we naturally select what we know we can do. We get the dopamine hit, reset, and look for the next problem we can already solve. I call that chasing the illusion of progress. The check is simple: are the problems getting harder and more complex? Because the growth that comes from those challenges is the reward.

Unclear communication takes time and energy to figure out. Clear communication lets people use that time and energy to act.

A Plausible Answer Isn't Necessarily the Right Answer Recently, a technician came to the house to repair the microwave. He needed an extra set of hands, so I offered to help. We got talking about craft, pride in our work, figuring things out, and even AI. After the repair, we kept talking for another 90 minutes. He shared a story about a customer whose refrigerator wasn't cooling. Over the phone, he asked a series of questions and suspected a faulty circuit board. The part was in short supply, but he'd found one for about $400. As he recalled it, the customer said something like: "I asked [a chatbot] to diagnose it, and it suggests the problem is likely the display panel. I can order one online." He said he'd tried to explain why he didn't think the display panel was the problem. The panel connected back through the circuit board, and the symptoms didn't fit that kind of failure. He still suspected the board. But the customer was convinced the chatbot's answer made more sense, and it was cheaper. So they told the technician not to order the circuit board because they were going to get the replacement panel. When it arrived, they asked my new friend to install the panel. He did. It didn't fix the problem. He wasn't surprised. With the refrigerator in front of him, he confirmed the circuit board failure. Except now he couldn't find a replacement. I asked him what that meant for the repair, and he shook his head and said he wasn't sure yet. I don't know if or how that situation resolved. What stayed with me wasn't that the technician turned out to be right. It was how he got there. He knew what questions to ask, how to assess the answers, and what he needed to check. The customer had an answer. The technician knew how to find out whether it was right.