How to juggle tasks like you’re fighting a submarine

[Read time: 5 minutes]

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Enough of this. Lets get started.

Here’s how we juggle tasks like fighting a submarine.

A few years back I was the Weapons Engineering Officer in charge of a small team of instructors at the submarine command team trainer.

Our job was to get the teams in charge of the weapons trained and integrated with the rest of the command team.

On day one we would start slow…

…But by the end these guys were smooth and efficient.

• They would have drills and tactics memorised

• They would be able to think quickly under pressure

• And they could react to constantly changing scenarios.

It doesn’t matter how smart someone is, when you put them under pressure that they’re not used to, they freeze.

We would run many different drills to hone their skills, but there was one small tactic that I would have these guys do to keep them calm under pressure, that would have the biggest impact on their ability to succeed.

Take a step back.

Yes, literally.

Don’t:

• Pause for a moment…

• Take one big deep breath…

• Look around to distract yourself…

Literally stop and step back.

Nine times out of ten, when one of the officers was getting overwhelmed, their head was buried in a screen…

…And when your head is in buried in a screen you can’t see everything else that’s going on around you…

…And when you’re not paying attention to everything around you, you miss things and it starts to get out of your control!

This leads to a vicious cycle.

By taking a literal step back, you widen your peripheral vision and make yourself more aware of the situation around you, and when you’re not buried in detail you free yourself up to make decisions faster.

One time I had to literally pull a guy back from the screen and make him stand in one spot.

He had got himself into a right mess.

There was so much going on around him and he wasn’t making any decisions. Head stuck in the display he wanted more information before acting. By the time he had the information, the situation had changed!

I pointed to a spot on the floor and said he couldn’t move until after the run was completed.

Immediately he began making better decisions, faster.

It was like I could see a lightbulb go off in his head as he saw himself improve in real time.

So what if you’re not trying to fight a submarine?

How does this help you?

Well like a physical step back, a mental step back helps just as much.

A leader will almost definitely have multiple lines of effort being balanced all at once.

• Sales team needs to update me with X

• Marketing haven’t got back to me with Y

• I haven’t even seen the Engineers today?!

What separates a good leader from a bad leader is how well they can deal with these different topics.

Even in this situation a physical step back can help. A different location can provide a different perspective and a clearer mind.

A good leader will not get swept away by the nitty gritty details of any one of these lines of effort because they trust the teams and the leaders of those individual teams to deliver.

They are able to take that physical or mental step back and make the more strategic decisions faster.

Rather ironically, not having all the details they could have, often leads to better decisions. Because you can’t hold all the details for everything, you need to be able to use the information you‘ve got to make the best decision at the time.

If new information is presented to you at a later date, it is okay to change your mind (as long as you’re not changing it every 5 minutes).

It is okay to accept that you got something wrong. Explain it to the team:

People appreciate that a lot more than ploughing on with a plan we all know to be terrible…

So lets recap.

When there is a lot to juggle in a stressful situation, take a physical step back.

Do not allow yourself to be overwhelmed by information to the point where you can not make decisions.

This is a skill to be trained, but it’s absolutely invaluable and is something I wish I had learned earlier on in my career.

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Have a great day.

Reece

P.S. A freebie.

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