Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 44 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Don’t be a hero
— From REWORK: Change the way you work forever by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
“A lot of times it’s better to be a quitter than to be a hero,” say Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
Whaaaaat?!
The authors of Rework explain: “Let’s say you think a task can be done in two hours. But four hours into it you’re still only a quarter of the way done. The natural instinct is to think, ‘But I can’t give up now, I’ve already spent four hours on this!’ So you go into hero mode. You’re determined to make it work (and slightly embarrassed that it isn’t already working). You grab your cape and shut yourself off from the world.”
Sometimes that sheer determination and work overload can produce your desired results. “But,” the authors ask, “is it worth it?” Probably not is the answer. “The task was worth it when you thought it would cost two hours, not sixteen.”
Yet we feel terrible to leave behind, as incomplete, that investment of time and effort. While you will be the one to decide whether it’s worth it or not, you can help decrease the emotional overload by purposefully ignoring sunk costs, as you cannot get them back.
As world-traveler and side hustling guru, Chris Guillebeau, says in this post, regardless of how much time you’ve spent, “consider the next [period] of your life, not the previous investment that brought you this far.”
Look at it this way, “In those sixteen hours you could have gotten a bunch of other things done.” Plus, by going into hero mode, “you cut yourself off from feedback, which can lead you even further down the wrong path. Even heroes need a fresh pair of eyes sometimes—someone else to give them a reality check.”
The authors share how they’ve experienced and solved this problem firsthand: if anything takes them more than two weeks, they bring in someone else to take a look. That someone else might not do any work on the task, but they give their opinion. “Sometimes an obvious solution is staring you right in the face, but you can’t even see it.”
And while, most of the time, we tend to associate quitting with failure, “sometimes that’s exactly what you should do,” the authors point out. “If you already spent too much time on something that wasn’t worth it, walk away. You can’t get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.”
Remember, we can get or make almost everything back, except time. Don’t be a hero to defend a project that is dragging on for too long, instead, be the hero that defends your time and the best use of it.
And while you’ll find that sometimes you cannot “quit” the project altogether, because it’s out of your control, and it continues to drag on, look for ways to substitute yourself. Is there someone whose time and talent are better spent on this than yours? Can you ask for help? Can you outsource it? Think creatively and you’ll come up with the best solution.
To dispel the myth of quitting as a failure, here are some other posts about that: Selective quitting, Quit before you start, and Understanding when to quit and when to stick.
Let me know in the comments here if you’ve ever gone into hero mode and what you learned about it!
ACTION
TODAY: Take a look at your tasks at work and life. Is there a particular one that is taking longer than anticipated? Are you thinking about going into hero mode or already there? Reexamine the situation and consider how you can solve it (if it needs solving at all) so that you can be a good steward of your time.
FUTURE: Keep track of where your time goes for a week or a month, it’s a great exercise, as only that way we can truly see how much time we spend on hero mode without necessarily knowing about it. Sometimes we go into microhero mode and don’t even detect it: that extra long phone conversation, that meeting that went on for too long, etc., they all add up and we don’t even notice except when we look at the data in front of us. Time management guru, Laura Vanderkam, has a simple but effective time tracking sheet and a time makeover guide (it’s free).
Know someone who is about to go into hero mode? Save him or her some time! Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!