Productivity has limits!
Last night at my birthday party, a friend told me how his company insists he show up at work before 9 to make sure everyone’s productive. It seems we’re always trying to increase productivity. But this isn’t sustainable.
You see, productivity has its limits. Period. A woman can’t have a baby in six months by trying really hard. The process takes nine months. You can’t add a woman, hoping that two women working together can make one baby in four and a half months. The process takes one woman nine months.
Every task takes a certain amount of time to complete. If you’re manufacturing round metal paperweights, the metal has to be melted and then cooled. Those physical processes can only happen so fast without the metal breaking. We might be able to speed them up a little here and there, but at the end of the day, no amount of investment can speed the process beyond a certain point.
So it makes me wonder how we know when we’re as productive in an area as it’s possible to be? I have timed myself over and over, and I write about 400 words of finished draft per hour. My mood doesn’t affect it much, my typing speed isn’t the limit. That just seems to be how long it takes me to write a finished draft. Do I try to improve it, thus improving my productivity, or am I going as fast as possible already (since writing happens subconsciously), and I just relax and go with the flow?
It’s a question worth asking businesses, who often pour resources into misguided attempts at improvement, where the status quo is just fine on its own.
It’s also worth asking yourself. Some people look for their weaknesses and try to improve them. But your weaknesses may be just fine as they are. Maybe your time is best spent enjoying life, instead!
Stever, great to read your blog. The question of productivity is interesting when applied to experts. How do you make an expert more productive? Traditionally, we think about how a worker is more productive if a process/task is done faster, better or cheaper. Let’s take a musician as an example. How do you make a quartet more productive? You can¨t play faster. You can’t play more than one instruments. The only way you can improve productivity is to play better together! And in order to do that, you have to spend more of your energy listning to the other players. And guess what. In order to do that, you have to play less, play simpler things on your instrument or increase your own skill-level.
In an expert environment, two days are never the same. Our main job is to interact with others. And in this environment, productivity gain is measured in our ability to fit with the context. It’s no longer about doing things 100% right but rather to do the right things 80% of the time.
Productivity is enhanced if you can fit your contribution better to the context. Like a comedian, your producivity is measured by your ability to tell the perfect joke for the occation, not to tell the joke in a perfect way…
Hope all is well. Check out my JazzCode site: http://www.carlstormer.com.
Best,
Carl
June 28th, 2007 at 3:57 pm