For Big Ideas: Spend 30% of Your Time Living in the Future
By Mr. Nohman
Big ideas rarely reveal themselves to you when you’re stuck in a reactive workflow. Swimming upstream against a current of emails, meetings and micro-distractions every day, and you can go entire days, weeks, or months without conjuring up the big-picture ideas needed for long-term success.
Rather than wait for a distant company retreat, an elusive epiphany or a sporadic brainstorming session, Noah Weiss, former Product Manager at Google, suggests scheduling time for big ideas into your week.
Manage your time like Google invests its resources: 70/20/10. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it way back in 2005:
“We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses: Google News, Google Earth, and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new.
It’s easier to come up with one new idea every week than 10 ideas in a one-week sprint. To build the time to live in the future and bring great ideas back, Weiss cautions us to get clear.
You are completely responsible for shipping products fast, above a minimum quality bar, and with the right scope. But your job doesn’t end there. Clean up your calendar, shut off your email occasionally, keep track of insightful observations, and set aside time to think further ahead.
