We all want to get more accomplished every day, especially if we can do it with less effort. The key is to increase the effectiveness of how you use the only true limiting factor you have–your time.
So many people and organizations are stretched to the max today, trying to keep up with the rising tide of work and the demands to “do more with less”. It’s very easy to get caught up in the inevitable “fires” that hit us everyday and find ourselves wondering where another day went and if we really got any closer to our goals. A great way to start breaking this cycle and increasing effectiveness is to have some simple strategies the lean on as you go through your day.
Improving Productivity at Work
So many things compete for our time, and our decisions about where to spend it is one of the most critical factors in determining how successful we will be. Whether you are an entrepreneur creating the next Google, a manager needing to improve her department’s performance, or if you just want to improve your work productivity, it’s critical to keep in mind there will always be more things that could be done than you are able to do. And what you choose to do will have a enormous impact on how productive and successful you will be at work.
The three strategies below are distilled from more than 30 years of helping people and companies improve productivity. They are among our most popular and successful methods and best of all each can be implemented right away, starting today.
1. Define “What good looks like”
The first step in making any change—and becoming more productive does require change—is having a clear, simple picture of “what good looks like”. (This phrase became so popular with my clients that they created an acronym—WGLL.) Using the concept is simple—form in your mind, or better yet write down, a clear picture of what you should be doing to get the result you want. Don’t focus on the outcome, focus on the action to achieve what you want.
So for instance if you are a salesman who closes sales face to face, you might for the picture of sitting in front of a prospect understanding his needs and showing how your product addresses them. Sometimes it’s easier to start by looking at something outside of yourself. So for instance if you manage a team of programmers that is struggling to deliver a new software on time, for WGLL you might write: programmers are sitting at their desks coding. (There is a great example of the power of WGLL in my post BLUE LIGHT)
Once you have the picture in your mind, or even better, on paper, keep going back to it and comparing it to what you find yourself doing throughout the day. Knowing what good looks like will give you a way to keep bringing yourself back to what you should be doing and help you to steer away from more of the stuff that doesn’t take you where you want to go. Over time you can refine your definition of WGLL to make it sharper and more precise, further increasing your effectiveness. If you spend more time doing WGLL, you see your productivity increase steadily.
2. Find the constraint
“So, where’s your constraint?” is a question I have asked virtually all of my clients over the years. Surprisingly they usually don’t have a swift and unequivocal answer. Usually they give me a list—not one thing but many, or I get a blank look or an “I don’t know”, or the old stand-by, “it moves around”.
Since every system or organization must have a weakest link, (bottleneck, constraint, etc.) the bottom line is that if you don’t know where your constraint is, you almost certainly aren’t focused on it. Your constraint, or the constraint of your company or department, determines the performance of the whole system. You can only produce as much as your weakest link produces.
While the inability to answer my question usually produces dismay or a feeling of self-consciousness in the person I speaking with, it always makes me smile. Because I know that if they don’t know their constraint that we can quickly and dramatically make things better for them simply by answering the question. Knowing where your constraint is—what truly limits your performance—shifts your focus, sharpens it in fact. If you simply find your constraint and focus on it, you will see performance increase dramatically and with much less effort than you have already been putting in because you are applying your effort to the right place or thing. Apply WGLL to the constraint and you get even faster results.
3. Measure it
Whether you are trying to improve yourself or an organization, having feedback on how you are doing is vital. Without a way to evaluate performance you don’t know if what you are doing is working or taking you in the wrong direction. It’s like playing a game without having a way to keep score.
If WGLL looks like is doing face to face sales calls measure how many you do each day, week, month. If the constraint of your business is the engineering department, measure how many good drawings or designs get accomplished. Sometimes it can be tough to create a measurement, but don’t give up getting something “close” is good enough to start and its definitely better than relying on your impression of progress.
Even better combine your measures with the changes you make. Whenever you try something new to improve productivity pay attention to the measures—did they go up, or not? Having measures that provide fast feedback on the results gives you the information you need to keep the effective ideas and weed out the unproductive ones.
Taking Action
The beauty of these techniques is that they don’t require a high degree of precision or expertise. So don’t waste time trying to make your answers perfect, start right away and go. If you’ve made a misstep it will become apparent quickly and you can adjust.
A story from one of my clients illustrates this bias toward action. Many years ago a plant manager in a large tech company told me they were stuck because they couldn’t agree on where their constraint was. “If we don’t know where the constraint is, how do we even begin?” They had narrowed it to three possible areas in the plant and gathered tons of data on it over 9 months and it was still unclear.
“Pick one” I told them. When he just stared at me blankly I asked, “what’s the worst that can happen?” Then before he could, I answered the question for him, “You could pick the wrong one.” If you pick the wrong one but operate as if it is the constraint you expect that the output of the entire plant will be the same as the output of the constraint, and that all the other operations (non-constraints by definition have more capacity than the weakest link) can keep up.
“So how long would it be until you found out that another operation couldn’t keep up or that the plant output was different from the chosen constraint’s output.” While I stood there his two operations managers conferred quietly. After a few minutes one of them turned to us and said “6 days, maybe less.” We all smiled. The only mistake they had made was “not to start.” Don’t make their mistake!
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Now I have a question for you. What techniques have you used to help improve productivity? How did they work? Or you try any of these techniques let us know what worked for you. Sharing your stories and experiences helps all of us to improve our effectiveness and get more of what we want from life. Thanks and have a great day!