eliminating waste work will give you 50% of your productive time back
We are not going into the mechanics of methods and process of applying culture in our day to day work. I will share the framework that I have picked from a time management course.
Let’s call it Urgent vs Importance Framework. Breaking your daily log into 1 hour each. Do the log for the next 10 days that’s 2 business weeks. Do a review after 2 weeks and mark against each item Was it urgent & important?
Most of the waste has an attribute of urgent but not important. What is important for us now? Is it adding value to clients? Are we making money from this work? Is it good enough for the client? Is it reducing unclarity for the team? Is it increasing the confidence in delivery on time?
Some other indicators of waste you can mark
- Skill deficits in both technical and human skills
- Rabbit hole doing trial and error or non-productive work
- Unproductive team meeting
- Misinformation or lack of it
- Expectation/priority mismanagement
- Colleagues pull up for questions
- Non-work
Let’s lean on some leverage something we already have and build on it. Most of you are already logging in https://probench.plan.io/. Break it for a 1-hour chunk. When we say you will get 50% back it means that those hours will double your outcome. To be specific it’s billable hours for each one of us. it’s about measuring if your billable hours are maintained each month and have a trend of moving upwards. So that you will never be labelled as unproductive or a liability to the team.
What to do with the time you got back?
Constantly look for the things to remove, simplify, and streamline.
Vikram Shetty 