Skip to Content
The Art of Leadership
book

The Art of Leadership

by Michael Lopp
May 2020
Beginner
195 pages
4h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from The Art of Leadership

Chapter 27. A Precious Hour

I am told that the manner by which others understand that I am busy is when my writing coherence suffers. This primarily occurs in emails, when whole words are dropped, sentences become jumbled, and logic falls on the floor. Rands, I literally did not understand what you were asking in that email.

Poorly written emails are an early warning of intense busyness. Yes, I lack the time to proofread an email, but the mail is sent. At least I accomplished something. The step beyond this is when s—t is truly falling on the floor, and while s—t on the floor is professionally unacceptable, there used to be a point of irrational pride in my head when this situation occurred: look at me, how important I must be, with all the…busy.

It’s this irrational pride I want to examine, because hidden inside of it is an insidious red alert situation.

The State of Busy Is Seductive

7:15 a.m. I sit down at my desk, fire up my calendar, and examine my day. Six meetings, starting in 45 minutes. All are compelling, all are likely to lead to progress. Good. Switch to Things and examine the backlog. I’ve got 45 minutes and 23 open tasks. Which of these should I prune? Which of these stay…Say, I’ve been meaning to call Joe for a week. I’ll call him now.

7:25 a.m. Joe and I are on similar morning caffeination plans, so the call is high bandwidth. We’re done with our three topics in 10 minutes, and I’m now sporting the rush of not just completing a task, but completing it at speed. ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

The Art of Leadership

The Art of Leadership

Michael Lopp
The Goal

The Goal

Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox
HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People (with featured article "Leadership That Gets Results," by Daniel Goleman)

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People (with featured article "Leadership That Gets Results," by Daniel Goleman)

Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman, Jon R. Katzenbach, W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492045687Errata Page