Think Small to Go Big!

How splitting up your work into smaller, discrete tasks, can help you and your business go further, faster.

You see a lot of “Life Hack” advice appearing on many sites including our fair medium.com.

“These bad work habits are killing your career”

“7 Things to Stop Doing to Save your Dog”

The reality is there is little in these of universal applicability. Perhaps that’s a good thing, as each situation is often markedly different. Or is it?

All Curves Aren’t Created Equal

In businesses, operations have several stages, each of which is a triage from one state to another. You, as a worker in an organisation, may finish some work and tell your boss. Your boss, between meetings, phone calls and reporting, notifies their counterpart in department B, themselves in between meetings, phone calls and reporting, that they need your work to be tested or packaged (or even both). What do we have here?

Pulling this like a string reveals the end-to-end flow.

So what does this mean? It means that in any one hour slot, the managers have a certain probability of sending your work on in any one day. In other words, their response isn’t instant. Hence, your work sits on their desk until they get round to it. Then it sits on their colleague’s desk until they get round to it. All this, just to tell the tester that your work is ready to be tested. Your performance is entirely dependent on your manager’s timeline.

Here’s something radical. What about…

So let’s look at this. Your manager is now not in any way involved in the rate at which you deliver your work. Their schedule doesn’t impact your schedule. These both take out the time required for your manager to look at your work or message, before then passing it on to their counterpart who also “costs” time to look at your work before informing their staff.

What sort of situation impacts your schedule? Micromanagement is one prime example. However, any activity which involves your managers in the value gates slows down the flow.

Most obviously? It gives managers a lot less work to do! If 20 tasks go through your manager, each taking 10 minutes to triage per manager, after 1 hour of waiting each, then the total time to get the task to your tester is 26hrs 40 minutes which could be saved across all folk per week.

TL;DR

Communicate direct. This is simply one of the best ways to increase your productivity. It also takes work of your plate. Think you’ll be without work? I don’t think you have to worry about that. More work will come around to fill the space available for it :)

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