Balancing technical work with leadership responsibilities can often feel like juggling multiple high-stakes priorities. The $10 method is a practical framework I’ve used to prioritize tasks and communicate my time investments effectively. This approach helps staff+ engineers make informed decisions about their time allocation and maximize their impact within their organizations. 

What is the $10 method?

The $10 method is a powerful tool for managing your time and energy. Imagine you have $10 to “spend” on various tasks and projects. This budget represents your total bandwidth, compelling you to think critically about where your efforts are most needed.

The goal is to distribute your $10 across tasks based on their importance and value to you and your team. 

How to get started

Step 1: List and categorize tasks

Begin by creating a document and listing down all the tasks and projects on your plate. Group them into logical categories such as individual contributor work, mentoring and teaching, strategic planning, operational rhythm, learning and development, and customer engagement. This categorization helps in visualizing where your time is being spent and what areas need more focus.

Step 2: Allocate the $10 budget

Now comes the crucial part. Distribute your $10 across these tasks. For instance, you might allocate $4 to a critical project (individual contributor work), $3 to team leadership activities (mentoring and teaching), $2 to process improvements (operational rhythm), and $1 to personal development (learning or skills enhancement). The key is to be honest with yourself about the importance and value of each category.

This allocation process forces you to prioritize and make conscious decisions about your time. Be strategic about how you distribute your currency. If you find yourself allocating less than $0.50 to a task, it’s time to question its real value, as it may be a sign you’re overcommitting. 

Spreading yourself thin across too many tasks can dilute your effort and focus. Recognizing when to defer or delegate tasks not only helps maintain your focus but also fosters a growth environment for your team. By empowering others to take on tasks, you contribute to their career development and create a more resilient and capable team.

Step 3: Review and discuss allocations

Discuss your completed $10 document with your manager or peers and open up a dialogue about differing perspectives on the importance of tasks. You might consider something critical that others do not, leading to deeper discussions about where you can have the greatest impact within the organization. 

Conversations with your manager might focus on strategic alignment ensuring your allocations support organizational goals, whereas discussions with peers can reveal varied viewpoints and insights into their priorities, allowing you to better align your work with what is most important to your organization

Reaching a consensus on task investment helps in aligning team priorities and ensuring everyone is on the same page. It also provides clarity to your team about your focus areas, making it easier for them to understand your commitments. This transparency can enhance trust and coordination within the team, as everyone knows where efforts are being concentrated and how they contribute to collective objectives.

Quarterly and monthly reviews

Revisit your allocations quarterly and review them monthly.  Monthly reviews serve as markers to keep track of and adapt to any changes in priorities, maintaining flexibility. Quarterly reviews take a broader perspective, assessing the overall alignment of your efforts with long-term goals and strategic objectives. Be particularly cautious of getting caught up in operational details. It's crucial to strike a balance and ensure you're also dedicating time and resources to long-term, high-impact projects that align with your strategic objectives.

When making adjustments, don’t erase previous allocations; instead, strike through them. This preserves history and provides a clear record of how priorities have shifted over time. This historical context can offer valuable insights for future decisions, enabling you to identify patterns, understand the impact of past adjustments, and make more informed choices moving forward.

Remember, the exercise of setting the budget itself is the most valuable part. It requires you to really think about what you need to do to make your teams and projects successful and how to balance between short- and long-term goals. Even if you don’t act on the results immediately, the act of planning can provide clarity and direction.

Defining tangible deliverables

For each task or project, try to define clear and tangible deliverables. This could be a document, a code artifact, or a completed feature that you aim to deliver by the end of the quarter. This is where the $10 method and goal-setting work hand-in-hand. By assigning a dollar value to each task, you highlight its relative importance. If you find that you're consistently unable to reach your goals within your current $10 setup, it may signal the need to reassess and redistribute your allocations.  

Having concrete goals helps maintain focus and ensures that you actually complete the prioritized work. Defining deliverables ensures that even if you cannot complete a task, it is left in a state that someone else can build on. This means documenting your progress, sharing your code, and providing sufficient context so that others can pick up where you left off without needing to start from scratch. This continuity is important for maintaining momentum and ensuring that the team’s overall productivity is not hampered by individual bandwidth constraints.

Final thoughts

I’ve personally found the $10 method to be an effective tool for prioritizing my time and efforts. This approach has led to meaningful discussions with my team and managers, aligning our efforts towards common goals. Many of my peers have also adopted this strategy and found it useful. It’s a straightforward yet impactful way to ensure you’re focusing on what truly matters and making the most of your time.

This approach not only enhances your productivity but also supports the career growth of your team members by providing opportunities for delegation. Ultimately, it helps leaders maintain focus, avoid burnout, and drive impactful results within their organizations.