Just-In-Time PM #16: Effective ROA

In Part 15, I advocated for multithreading, or weaving together multiple projects to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and synergies.

To take advantage of the benefits of multithreading, it’s critical that you begin to think of yourself not as a lone project manager, but as a project portfolio manager (PPM). Traditionally found only in large companies with hundreds of simultaneous projects, digital technology has made it possible and necessary for each of us to manage a portfolio.

The two most important skills you’ll need as a PPM are:

• Choosing the right projects to start (good inputs)
• Maximizing project completions (good outputs)

To accomplish these, we’ll need to refine our understanding of Return on Attention (ROA), first introduced in Part 1.

When determining the return on our attention, our natural inclination is to focus on throughput, which is how many projects actually get completed.

If Minaal takes on 10 projects, but only finishes 5, she has a throughput of 50%. Nitai might take on only 3 projects, but finish 2 of them, resulting in a higher throughput of 66%. Most people correctly sense that it is project completions that matter, and often will resist starting new ones until their current ones finish.

But now let’s add an important wrinkle. It is not throughput that matters so much as throughput per constraint unit. If you remember from Part 2, unlike units of time or money, not all units of attention are created equal. You might have an average “attention budget” each week of:

• 6 hours of deep focus
• 8 hours of mild focus
• 10 hours of light focus
• 22 hours of administrative work

With this budget, the constraint is clearly deep focus, and a constraint unit (CU) would be one hour of deep focus time (a CU is equivalent to a “flow cycle,” discussed in Part 3).