The fastest and most effective way to improve productivity is to focus on your strengths, but how do you work out what they are?
If you have a very clear picture of your core business and have long since identified your biggest selling products and your most profitable customers you might be wondering what’s left to improve. A while ago I wrote a post about writing a “Don’t Do List”. It’s a little bit counter intuitive to write a list of all the things you could stop doing, but it really works. It’s the same principle that makes Lean Six Sigma, Total Quality Management and other well known quality and efficiency methods so effective — but this is a lot cheaper, simpler and you can do it right now.
A fundamental of any efficiency or quality program is waste elimination — that is, how does a business identify, isolate and remove waste throughout the entire business process (from order to cash — or even more broadly, extending to your entire supply chain)?
If you can eliminate waste, you’ll not only have a more efficient business, you’ll also have a more focused and effective business, because by doing less your strengths will be more visible and easier to target.
No matter what size your business, or what your role in the company is, you can have a direct impact on productivity today, just by writing a Don’t Do List. So how do you do it? Let’s start now with your personal productivity.
Think of it as the opposite of a To Do List. First thing in the morning, when you’re planning your day, instead of writing down the myriad tasks you have to complete, start by writing down all of the tasks you could get away with not doing — and then don’t do them. This might prove a little difficult at first because your brain isn’t used to thinking this way — but if you persist for a few days, you’ll find not only that it gets easier to think of things to stop doing, but it also becomes a little bit addictive because the results are so immediate.
As soon as you’ve written the list, you have more time in your day, and your priorities are thrown into stark relief — this is the opposite of what happens each time you add an item to a to do list and each priority you add makes it less clear what’s important!
I’ll be developing this concept further in future posts, as well as giving examples of how you can apply this to teams and entire companies to make them more productive. Give it a go now, and let me know in the comments how it worked for you.
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