Do More with a Lot Less

Do More_ID-100128285For over a decade we have heard about many companies wanting to more with less. Terms such as right sizing, improved effectiveness, working with limited resources, restructuring and operational efficiency all describe the desire to do more with less. But looking at the statistics you have to wonder if we are actually doing more with less, considering that people are working more hours than ever before and producing less.

In the work of high-performance endurance athletics we have a term “junk miles”. It means the unnecessary training miles where an athlete receives no increase in performance and which in many cases may lead to over-training and injury. The same can be said about the amount of unproductive hours people work that don’t really have any impact on organizational goals and objectives.

Here are some of the signs that you may be putting in more junk hours than productive hours:

Your email controls you

Often people are so attached to receiving and sending emails during their day that they don’t have any quality time set aside to perform high-quality work such as strategic planning, making important calls, managing their team effectively and professional development. To help improve your performance in this area, plan designated times to check emails. This will free up the time in your day to do high-quality work, along with improving your ability to focus.

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings

Yes, we have a habit of booking meetings for everything we need to do. I am sure you have heard this before: “Let’s meet about this next week to figure out the details” or “I think we need another meeting”. Again, this could be another extensive list, but when we look at our calendar and we are triple-booked for meetings, something is not right. More junk hours means less productivity, or worse, less great work. One of the best ways to improve meetings is ensuring they are used for their ultimate purpose. That is making best use of people’s time. This usually entails starting and ending meetings on time, keeping the meeting room free of distractions and having an outline or agenda for the meeting. Doing these simple things consistently over time will greatly improve “meeting value”, resulting in less of a need for follow-up emails and more meetings.

Make yourself accountable for your time

High-performance athletes are known for having systems and methods in place to track the number of hours they are spending training, resting, and how they are feeling on a particular day. When you start to track your own working activities, you will be surprised by the amount of time spent on non-work tasks that we think are actually work related. Quality over quantity is the goal of this exercise.

Look at your calendar for the week and see where you are spending your time. Are you actually doing more with less or are you just putting in junk miles?

All the best in achieving your highest performance.

Paul

 

Image courtesy of marcolm at FreeDigitalPhotos.net