Jira and Trello Creator: “Successful People Often Feel Like Cheaters”
Mike Cannon-Brooks, co-founder of enterprise software company Atlassian, is committed to spending as much time as possible with his family. How he plans his day, what method helps to delegate tasks and what to do with the impostor syndrome - in a selection of his quotes.
About time management
Mike Cannon-Brookes founded software company Atlassian with fellow student Scott Farquhar in 2002, right after graduating from university. Over 20 years, Atlassian’s capitalization has grown to $36 billion, and Cannon-Brooks’ fortune to $9.4 billion. But despite the huge workload and responsibility, the entrepreneur always finds time for personal affairs.
He adheres to a strict daily routine and takes scheduling very seriously because “time cannot be turned back.” “I always try to find work-life balance,” he says. You can’t put life on hold to run a business. No job is important enough to sacrifice everything else."
An entrepreneur’s calendar always has a slot for “time with kids.” He says that this is a mandatory item, it cannot be canceled or moved, depending on it, he appoints working meetings and plans other things.
The Atlassian co-founder gets up early at five or six in the morning. “I need little sleep,” he admits. “I need four hours of sleep. If you manage to get six hours of sleep, that’s great,” he admits. Cannon-Brooks’ mornings don’t start with a workout, but with work and family matters. “It all comes down to prioritize and time management,” the entrepreneur is sure.
Another important item on the entrepreneur’s calendar is personal interests, which are given 10% of the time. Another Cannon-Brookes rule is that he almost always finishes work at 5:30 pm so that he can have dinner at home with his family at 6 pm.
About prioritization
To properly allocate time and effort, an entrepreneur uses a prioritization system similar to kanban (a project management method that helps visualize tasks). Cannon-Brooks assigns a priority to each problem that needs to be solved: 1, 2, 3 or 4. And if he directly solves the tasks of the first and second levels, then he delegates work on the third and fourth to subordinates.
“When I say that the second task is now moving to the third level, my deputy knows exactly what this means and takes appropriate measures,” he says. Cannon-Brooks thinks this is a useful mental model because he can only focus on two big tasks and four small ones.
According to him, this system is suitable not only for work, but also for planning household chores. “It is very important to include all this in the plan for the day, because even small tasks take time and effort,” says Atlassian co-founder.
About the decision tree
Cannon-Brooks uses the “decision tree” method in business, which was made popular by Susan Scott’s book “Talk to the Point”. He believes that it is a good tool for learning, scaling and communication.
A decision tree consists of a “root”, “trunk”, “branches” and “leaves”. The “sheet” level is routine questions, they are accepted by a subordinate, the boss does not even need to know about it. The decision at the “branch” level is made by the employee and reports it to the manager, but he does not need to interfere. The “root” level is the tasks that the boss solves. “Trunk” - situations when employees turn to management for help: “We need to decide what to do here. I think A and B are the main options. I’m leaning towards B, but it’s up to you."
“In business, people mix all these solutions all the time. As a result, the leader begins to think that this is only his job - to create a culture and deal with all the problems. Not! As the business grows and develops, more and more solutions must move from the level of “root” - “trunk” to “trunk” - “branches” or “branches” - “leaf”, - said Cannon-Brooks.
About impostor syndrome
He admits that although he is a well-known entrepreneur and owner of a fortune of several billion, he often feels that he does not deserve his success. “I felt like this for 15 years and at some point I learned that this feeling is called the impostor syndrome,” he says.
Cannon-Brooks said that often, even at meetings of the board of his own company, he felt like a “five-year-old”, who furtively writes down unfamiliar abbreviations in a notebook, and then searches for their meaning on the Internet. “You know you don’t have the skills, experience or qualifications to be eligible to be here, but you’re already here, and you need to find a way out somehow because you can’t just leave. It’s not the fear of failure, it’s not the fear of failing. It is rather a feeling that you got away with something, a fear that it will be discovered, that the moment will come and someone will understand everything,” explains the entrepreneur.
In 2006, Atlassian won the New South Wales Entrepreneur of the Year award. Cannon-Brooks was very surprised, it seemed to him that there had been a mistake. At the awards ceremony, he got into a conversation with a tablemate and admitted that he sometimes considers himself unworthy of all this and that one day someone will guess about it. The neighbor said that he was familiar with such sensations. “It was an important moment of enlightenment for me for two reasons. First, I realized that others know this feeling. Secondly, this feeling does not disappear when you achieve success. I thought that successful people do not consider themselves cheaters, and now I know that, most likely, the opposite is true,” the entrepreneur admits.
He is sure that the impostor syndrome can sometimes be useful. One day, Cannon-Brooks was browsing his Twitter feed and came across a tweet from Elon Musk. The creator of Tesla promised that he could solve the energy crisis in South Australia with the help of a battery station. Surprised, Cannon-Brooks asked Musk about the seriousness of his intentions, to which he replied that Tesla would build the largest station in the world in Australia in 100 days, and if it didn’t meet the deadline, the company would not demand money for its work. “All the major media in the country immediately needed my “expert opinion” on the situation. But do not forget that at that time I did not even know how the batteries in children’s toys differed from a 100 MW battery,” recalls Cannon-Brooks. He spent a week reading information about industrial batteries, electrical grids, renewable energy sources and trying to figure out whether this proposal is feasible. The story ended with Musk installing the battery system just in time. “At that moment, I knew for sure that I was an impostor,” says Cannon-Brooks. And I knew how to take advantage of that feeling. I didn’t see a way out of the situation, but I didn’t let it paralyze me.”
According to him, the impostor syndrome became his motivation, thanks to which he was able to turn his fear of “seeming like an idiot” to good use. “The most successful people I know don’t doubt themselves—they doubt their knowledge,” says Cannon-Brooks. “Asking for advice, they test their ideas, and that helps them grow, and the ideas just get better.” After this incident, the entrepreneur realized that the only way to overcome the impostor syndrome is not to get lost, not to freeze, but to try to benefit from it. You should not be afraid to ask for advice and use new knowledge to hone your ideas.
Sources: The Observer Effect, Ted Talks, Collective Hub, Australian Financial Review.