There is a concept in economics called Gresham’s Law, which is usually summarized as ‘Bad Money Drives out Good’. 

There’s a full writeup at Wikipedia, but in short: when there are coins that are made of varying amounts of a valuable metal (let’s say silver), but are worth the same amount by a government’s decree, people will rationally spend the coins with the least silver (the ‘bad money’) first, and hoard those with more silver. Over time, the ‘bad money’ dominates the usage of the currency.

Anyways, this is a reasonably well known and remarked-upon phenomenon. 

I only recently became aware of ‘Gresham’s Law of Time Management’ a theory about how managers (but, really, anyone who works with other people) spend their time. The best statement I’ve found is here (emphasis added): 

This law states that there is a general tendency for programmed activities to overshadow non-programmed activities. Hence, if a series of decisions are to be made, those that are more routine and repetitive will tend to be made before the ones that are unique and require considerable thought.

Different authors identify different patterns related to how this law manifests itself:

• ‘Doing the work’ instead of managing: because most managers find individual contributor work more familiar and less threatening than managerial work, so they’ll take on lower-leverage work instead of teaching/training someone else to do it. 

• ‘Clearing their desks’ for bigger decisions: managers attempt to do administrative work so they can ‘focus’ on really serious decisions. Unfortunately, the difference between clearing desks and procrastination is usually academic: in my experience, putting a decision last on your list rarely means that it will get the attention it deserves.

• Avoiding uncomfortable or anxiety-inducing situations: managers struggle to have difficult conversations with their team-members, or to make decisions that might cause conflict (canceling initiatives, changing management structure, etc). So they put them off. 

Having been a manager for a bit now, I have to admit that there’s something here: I’ve certainly been guilty of all three of these things at different points in my career (though if you look closely, the first two are really just examples of the third).

On the other hand, I think treating this as a failing, or implying that programmed activities & decisions are ‘bad’ (which is the connection to Gresham’s Law) is a bit unfair to managers. I can think of 3 reasons why it would be reasonable to focus on ‘routine’ decisions or meetings: 

Consistency and Clear Expectations 

A huge part of a manager’s mandate (at least how I see my mandate) is setting clear, predictable expectations for the people on their team. Programmed activities and rituals (regular planning meetings, one-on-ones, presentations to executives) are critical to how these expectations are set and fulfilled. 

As a manager, I expect people on my team to have flexibility around these milestones, but there’s a limit to how much they should (or will) sacrifice their personal plans for interrupt work and other ‘fire drills’.

Manager Credibility 

Presumably, if I’m managing a team, I am the one responsible for the form of many programmed activities that the team works through. If I am canceling them with frequency, what does that say about the value of those meetings? 

Hopefully, as a manager I’m regularly assessing the value of different activities I ask the team to spend their time on, and ensuring that the schedule I set makes the team more effective, not less. If I were to find myself regularly canceling something (or thinking that I should be working on something else), maybe the real issue is that this ritual isn’t very valuable. 

Regularly cutting meetings (or maybe more accurately minimizing the amount of time and administration needed for the regular operation of the team), seems like a more worthy goal to me than prioritizing interrupt work. 

Your Imperfect Knowledge

Finally, the things that seem important and urgent aren’t always as important and urgent as they seem. Disrupting your team comes with real cost, so you need to be pretty confident that work actually is important and urgent before you begin to postpone or cancel other work.

I’ve found that often, a little bit of time and discussion with relevant parties about an issue often leads me to realize a simple solution, or that the problem isn’t as big as I previously thought it was.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve seen lots of companies and managers commit ‘unforced errors’ by rushing to solve a problem without a lot of thought, or without considering their full universe of options. It’s hard to say with any confidence that it’s more common than ‘under-reacting’ to issues, but if I had to guess I’d imagine that errors happen each way with about the same frequency. 

While I was writing this: Rands wrote about an adjacent topic, and put it more succinctly: “Don’t confuse pressure with urgency. Don’t confuse importance with urgency”.

Synthesis 

So where does this leave managers?

The primary actionable question that got me thinking about this is: when should you blow up your week (yours or someone else’s), canceling or postponing regular decisions & meetings (or heaven forbid, a vacation) to deal with an important issue or emergency?

I would argue this is among the most important tactical level decisions that we make as managers. Blowing up a week (or a sprint, or a deadline, or canceling meetings) can have a galvanizing, focusing effect, and allow people to coordinate together without interruption for extended periods of time. On the other hand, it impacts your credibility and violates expectations that you’ve set for your team and your stakeholders.  

Obviously, there are no universal answers here: personalities, company culture, and the domain you work in all matter a great deal. 

Self-assessing a bit here, I think I fall on the ‘stick with the program’ side of things, though I’m not at the extreme. I work with people on either side of me on this spectrum. 

I think it’s valuable to know where you fall on this scale compared to your colleagues. If people on your team are more inclined to ‘Go into firefighting mode’ than you are, you’ll have to temper discussions of important issues to prevent them from going off track. On the other hand, teammates who want to stick with the program more are going to need explicit direction that you’re expecting immediate action from them when talking about something emergent. 

But more than anything, I think it’s important to think about whether you’re putting off decisions or conversations because they’re uncomfortable. You can be kind to yourself about the fact that you’re doing it, but trying to hide behind being busy with administrative tasks doesn’t serve you, your team, or your employer, so you have to find ways to do that work.