Substance to Operations Ratio

It’s a pretty simple idea. Keep the ratio of time you spend investing in the substance of your work in the 60 to 80% range and keep…

It’s a pretty simple idea. Keep the ratio of time you spend investing in the substance of your work in the 60 to 80% range and keep everything else secondary.

This is much easier said than done. This means your calendar cannot have 80% meetings or even 50% meetings, unless those rendezvous are part of a brainstorming process to increase substance.

The exemplar for this principle is Warren Buffett. In interviews, he recounts that he spends the majority of his day just reading. In his line of work, that reading is likely a huge contributor to his powerful instincts for reading the markets.

A challenge to this philosophy might be: what about the impact I could’ve had in the meetings or activities I did not attend to? It took me a long time to realize this, but when you run your days so close to the margins, you are only contributing marginal improvements to other’s work in the bite-size sessions you have together. Instead, it’s better to envision 2 to 3 important meetings in a day (or even in a week at the extremes) and the rest of the time thinking/learning/researching/preparing/developing hypotheses so your contribution can be a step-change improvement.

// Originally posted April 4, 2017 on prior blog //