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So Much To Do

My Performance | Conflicting Goals | So Much To Do | Do Less, Get More

So Much To Do, So Little Time

By Douglas R. Rosensteel, CMC

The trend today seems to be to load people to the hilt, under the assumption that unless people are busy, they are not earning their keep. The result is burnout, low productivity, high turnover, and poor quality. Whether the company is a startup or a mature business entity, this trend is alive and well.

Peter Drucker, in his 1963 Harvard Business Review article Managing for Business Effectiveness said the first duty of the business manager is “to strive for the best possible economic results from the resources currently employed.” It is a very interesting article, well worth reading, because it describes today’s work environment. Either Drucker was clairvoyant, or business has changed very little in nearly 40 years.

The manager’s job, in Drucker’s words, is “to direct resources toward opportunities for economically significant results.”

That means focusing on the right things and not wasting your time or your people’s time on the wrong ones. The problem, according to Drucker, is that we confuse the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency. There is a significant difference between doing the right things and doing things right.

Drucker says, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all.” He makes a valid point – if we are working on things that do not contribute to significant results, why are we working on them? The Quality community has created yet another catchphrase – doing the right things right. That is, doing with great efficiency that which ought to be done. We’re generally pretty good at that. What we’re not so hot at is deciding which things we should not be doing at all!

One reason is our intense focus on doing something. It is a rare organization that expects its people to sit around and do nothing but think. However, anyone who has ever been involved in an activity that actually produced significant results knows that the results would never have been achieved had there not been time to sit around and do nothing but think. They also know that during times when they were not able to produce significant results, it was because they were overloaded and did not have time to sit around and do nothing but think.

A principle generally called the Pareto Principle, and generally associated with the Quality Movement, states that in a social situation a very small number of events – 10% to 20% at most – account for 90% of all results, whereas the great majority of events account for 10% or less of the results and only serve to increase costs. That means we waste a lot of time on activity that does not contribute to the bottom line.

Let’s look at the basis for the claim that a small number of events produce the majority of the results. A handful of customers out of many thousands produce the bulk of the orders; a handful of products out of hundreds of items in the line produce the bulk of the volume; a few salesman out of several hundred produce two-thirds or more of all new business. Most grievances come from a few employees; most absenteeism can be narrowed down to specific individuals; most accidents occur in certain groups; truly poor (or great) performance is the realm of a few easily identifiable people.

We tend to place the best salespeople on the hardest accounts instead of focusing their talent on good accounts where they could generate extraordinary sales volumes. The most highly skilled workers get the toughest work, even though concentrating their skills on trouble free jobs would allow them to produce significantly more than the average worker. And we spend the bulk of our human resources efforts on managing the few problem employees instead of developing the capabilities of the good ones.

Conclusion

You are overloaded, stressed out, working on too many things and not completing any of them to your satisfaction. Ten percent of your activity contributes to ninety percent of your results. Ask yourself, “What features of my job strive for the best possible economic results from the resources at my disposal, and what features do not?”

Identify the 10% of your activities that produce 90% of your results. Put more emphasis on those activities. Of the remaining and result-less 90% of your activities, decide what you should delegate to the proper level, what you must keep for legal or other reasons, and what you can just plain stop doing.

Be careful not to confuse results with tasks when analyzing your work activities. Conducting training is a task. Improving productivity is a result. Doing the former without achieving the latter is just putting in time.

In today’s environment, employers should be paying for results, not for putting in time.

 

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