What’s important?

I’ve been weeding some old books out of my shelves. Something I noticed about the management genre is that the best books are usually the ones that gave the simplest advice. Here’s one common insight that’s so simple it hardly seems worth printing: “Decide what’s important and what’s not important.”

That wisdom is phrased in various ways, but the gist is clear enough. It’s so clear and so obvious that I used to roll my eyes at it. Something so simple seemed to lack sophistication. Who wants to be unsophisticated?

Well, maybe I do. I’ve noticed, as the decades have gone by, that most bad management decisions are rooted in the failure to heed the simple distinction between important and not important.

I’ve also noticed that this advice can stretch, or shrink, to just about any situation. It applies whether we’re managing our time, managing a household, managing a labor force, or even managing ships or aircraft. We’re all managers of some kind, even if we don’t think of ourselves as managers.

One reason that non-important things seem to get a lot of attention is that they’re often the easier choices. In home life, it’s easier to sit on the couch and watch TV than to exercise. In a business context, it’s easier to watch a computer screen than to visit the field operations to see what’s really going on. Some cruel trick of nature seems to have made the important things the ones we’re least inclined to choose, while the unimportant ones are more comfortable or fun.

Another reason that the non-important can prevail is that other people with other agendas can put pressure on us to switch our priorities. If you’re in a safety-critical job, for example, the higher-ups might pressure you to cut corners so they can save money. That has happened to me, and I didn’t argue about it, I simply walked off the job.

And yet another way the non-important wins is when things get convoluted, for example when the multi-tasking mindset introduces the notion of juggling several priorities all at once. In theory, if things are done right, this can lead to more optimal outcomes. There is, in fact, an entire field of study in economics known as “constrained optimization.” The math is often elegant here. The real world, however, often involves situations that are more raw than refined. Optimal decisions are often delicate and intricate, while decisions made with blunter wisdom are often more sturdy.

My pals and I used to talk about optimization all the time. You can thank school for that. But now we’re more inclined to prefer situations that are “good enough” while being less delicate and less prone to failure. You can thank the real world for that. From what I’ve seen, it’s better to be 30-percent less clever than 1- percent too clever.

It’s not just the allure of fancy equations that can pull us off the better path. The allure of words can also do that. Give someone enough time to “explain” something, and they can make the important seem unimportant while making the unimportant seem important. When I was in corporate life, waves of pop-psychology management trends were always washing through the offices. As a result, views about what was important, and not important, were always floating in and out.

To a dedicated careerist, the important thing was to hold the fashionable opinion about what was important. One of my friends, an engineer in management ranks, maintained a list of the popular buzzwords, and he’d circulate it every few months so we could feign conformity.

Well, so much for my corporate memories. Saipan doesn’t have much corporate bureaucracy, so many readers have been spared the indignities of living in a real-life Dilbert cartoon.

Looking back at being the managers of our own lives, if we want to get a little philosophical, we could consider that we’d be in good shape if we could jibe what’s important over the next 10 years with what’s important in the next five minutes. To the extent that these things mesh, our immediate actions are in harmony with our bigger goal. To the extent that these things don’t mesh, we’re at risk of squandering our time.

Anyway, this is one topic that leapt to mind as I sorted through my bookshelf. Some of the management books will get dusted off and put back on the shelf. Some others will be tossed out. The simple wisdom endures. The fashionable ideas are gone; until, that is, they get recycled.