Whatever you’re doing, you need to stop

We're all swamped, snowed under, slammed. It seems the only way to manage our avalanche of emails, overlapping meetings and preponderance of priorities is to work faster.

While it feels like we need to go, go, go, success may actually lie in stopping every once in a while. I'm not talking about making time for family, exercise, networking (these go without saying). I’m suggesting that we stop in the course of our work for the purpose of achieving better outcomes.

Stop to be productive on the right things.

In “Invasion of the VUCAns,” Kathy Bernhard explains that there is a tendency for leaders to move quickly “having been conditioned that ‘faster is better’ no matter what.”¹ She points out that this was preferable in intermittent periods of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, but no longer serves well as VUCA has become a constant. By stopping to determine the level of task complexity, we can delegate the tasks others can do and invest time in the highly complex tasks that require more attention and reflection.

Stop to recognize progress.

While it’s generally accepted that acknowledging good performance outcomes has a favorable impact on employee performance, Harvard professor, researcher and creativity expert Teresa Amabile found a significant effect when leaders praised employees on their progress. Rather than waiting for project completion, she suggests that we can boost productivity and motivation just by stopping to reflect on what’s been accomplished so far. The title of her new book says it all: “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work.”

Stop to improve.

The Agile Project Management approach requires project teams to complete a small part of the deliverables and then stop to reflect every two weeks. Why? Because Agile is designed to ensure teams glean and apply insights from their work in order to improve. We learn from experience when we stop to reflect on what went well and what didn’t and to explore how to use this information to make adjustments going forward.

Stop to figure out what can be stopped.

We keep adding priorities. No wonder we're suffocating under the weight of our “to do” lists. We can make room for new priorities by identifying and removing the old ones that have low impact or are no longer relevant.

I'm sure there are more, but in the spirit of this blog, I'll stop here and give you a turn!

¹ Bernhard, Kathy. “Invasion of the VUCAns.” http://www.tldgroupinc.com/Invasion_of_the_VUCAns.html , 2014.

² Amabile, Teresa M. and Kramer, Steven J. The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Review Press. Boston, 2011.