As a freelance consultant, the speed at which I deliver work is an important metric for me to understand. It allows me to gauge how many projects I can take on at any given moment. I’ve been monitoring my size-of-work-to-delivery-velocity closely over the past few months to create better legibility for myself, and in examining this delivery speed, I’ve discovered something fundamental about the way I work, something that has long driven me crazy no matter what type of work I do — tempo.
What do I mean by tempo? In this context, tempo means the expectation set with the self, collaborators, clients, or bosses as to when work of various types and sizes can and will be completed.
If you’ve ever sent a request to a co-worker and had the thought, “I’ll probably get that back from them by the end of the day today,” then you are engaging in the physics of tempo. You took an underlying size estimate of a piece of work and the relative speed said co-worker typically completes that type of task and calculated the turnaround time. As an equation, tempo might look something like this:
Tempo (T) = Size of Work (S) / Expected Turnaround Time (E)
Having legible tempos between employee-boss, consultant-client, or colleague-colleague helps develop predictable and pleasant work relationships. However, things can go awry when there is a tempo expectation deviation on either side of these relationships.
Tempo deviations on this micro-level can happen for several macro-level reasons: staffing changes, sudden shifts in business needs, process or requirement updates, or many other classic organizational pivots.
The resulting impact is someone, somewhere is requesting a piece of work (the Requester) and has an expectation of the person fulfilling that piece of work (the Fulfiller) that isn’t being met, which can lead to the Requester feeling anxious. That anxiety then leads the Requester to do whatever they can to feel less anxious about the “delayed” work, which often looks like following up with the Fulfiller, complaining to a co-worker about the situation, or even going as far as messaging the Fulfiller’s manager.
These actions typically have the consequence of passing the anxiety from the Requester to the Fulfiller who now senses, or flat out is aware, the Requester thinks the request should have been completed at this point.
And the world goes round and this game of anxious hot potato happens again and again and again in work relationships where there is tempo mismatch.
Now, things get particularly interesting when tempo mismatches are self-induced; when they emerge on the micro-level. This phenomenon typically only happens on the Fulfiller side of things.
How can tempo mismatch be self-induced? Let’s look at an example:
Let’s say Mark is a new employee of Company X. His job is to design social media assets for the content team. Since Mark is new and deeply cares about what his new co-workers think about him, he delivers high-quality social media assets at a pace that is not sustainable for him. For instance, he’ll work overtime the first few weeks on the job to get 1-2 more requests completed than he has time for in a reasonable shift, or he’ll skip lunch or not move from his desk for an ungodly stretch of hours. After a few weeks of this pace, the content team starts to think of Mark as “that one designer who can turn around high-quality assets at the last minute.” So, when those types of requests come up, the content team always goes to Mark. Now, Mark finds himself in a working norm where his tempo requires constant overtime work and lunches at his desk hunched over his keyboard.
In playing this example out further, Mark will eventually get burned out and either quit, complain constantly to everyone in his life to no avail, or maybe he will set new boundaries with the content team. But that final option would require him to be aware he’s in a trap of his own making and therefore has the authority to get himself out of the situation.
This self-induced trap is one I have often created for myself at the expense of myself. I think this trap might be especially sticky for the over-achiever or people-pleaser types. As mentioned above, the only way of truly getting out of an existing self-induced tempo bind is to reset expectations with Requesters.
But the better option is to understand what your tempo is in specific contexts and set expectations upfront accordingly. For new, unknown situations, better to set these expectations far more conservatively than you expect and then slowly beat those expectations over time.
This is something I’m consistently trying to get better at, and I’m confident if I can master tempo-setting with myself and those I work with, I’ll feel a little lighter, calmer, and free.