John Cox

Idling

For an introduction to this article, please read the basis of my 7 Habits for Highly Productive People. I will probably have to change the title of this once I hear from Covey's lawyers, but in the meantime it works for me.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot an important rule in productivity. Each person has a finite capacity to do anything. Whether that is work, play, etc, we all have a finite capacity to get things accomplished. That finite capacity can be measured by time and energy. We may have the time to climb a mountain, but we lack the energy to do so. Energy and time are proportional to one another, where as the action is inversely proportional to the time that we have.

After I got out of the Navy, I started working as a manufacturing consultant. One of the first books that I read in my new position was The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. It taught me to understand manufacturing in very simple terms. There is a drum beat (constraint) in a plant which ties back to the amount of product (rope) that we want to introduce. The rate, or velocity that we produce is the amount of product that we have in our queue (buffer). The explanation is extremely simple and from my experience, extremely effective. The nice thing about the theory of constraints is that it matches up nicely to manufacturing, but it can also be used for any system that we throw at it.

Thinking of productivity as a system

Too often we are not thinking of our personal productivity as a system. We are instead worried more about what we have not gotten accomplished rather than being systematic in our approach to finish. One of the first things that I did when I got serious about being more productive and working less in my own hours, was to make a list. What constants do I have each day? In other words, what are the things that I absolutely have to accomplish each day that are reoccurring? These are what I use for my constraints. These specific tasks each day are my drum beat. I tie my drum beat back to my work. If I have to accomplish these reoccurring tasks, then how much more can I throw into my personal productivity system? This is my rope. What is the reasonable expectation for me to accomplish everything in my work queue? This is my buffer.

The amount of reoccurring work that I have to accomplish determines the number of projects that I take on in a given day. I want to accomplish all of my work, but I also want to accomplish it correctly and quickly, thus I keep my velocity (buffer) extremely high by working in serial. I bore extremely easily, and thus I have trained myself to work in extreme bursts of energy. This allows me to accomplish my work load for a given day without having to increase the time allowances (taking it home with me).

Why would I want my people to have idle time?

Idle time is an indication for any manager that your people have not hit their capacity limits. If you have hit your people's capacity then one of two things will happen. They will seek employment elsewhere because they are overworked, or you will since your department is not meeting the key measurements (customer penetration / customer retention / customer acquisition). Idle time shouldn't be hidden nor should it be frowned upon by any manager. It means that given a circumstance we should have the capacity to hit a given demand.

An important concept to remember is folks are going to have idle time regardless of whether they are below or above capacity. Minds wander. People wander. People have a finite amount of energy as well as time. Folks need to refresh their minds in order to have the ability to do critical thinking on any given problem. For instance, I have solved more problems in the smoke shack outside once I have given my mind a chance to relax.

How does this relate to my productivity?

If you are not scheduling idle time into your priorities, then you are not keeping your buffer low. If we can agree that the amount of work that we have in our queue quantifies the amount of time that we have to work, then the lower the amount of work, the faster that we can get it done. If, for instance, we have our set constraint work (email, phones, staff meetings, presentations etc) and we have two projects due in the next week, does it make more sense to work on both projects in unison and finish at the same time; would we rather finish one, refresh, finish the other. Which is more likely to have a quick resolution with quality work?

I am not at all advocating spending hours at a time staring at the ceiling, or avoiding work altogether. Instead, I am advocating looking at our constraints and filling our buffer with accomplishable tasks, all the while refreshing our energy level. Being non-productive to me means reading a chapter in a book. Look for ways to improve which are outside of the norm. Build trust in your team by having a personal conversation near the coffee pot. You are going to do this anyway, so why not work it into your schedule so it benefits you, rather than be non-systematic about your idle time?

Sum it up

Our productivity should be looked at as a system, rather than a chaos.

If we look at productivity as a system, then we can also optimize our system for the best results.
Our idle time is directly proportional to our capacity. When we have more idle time, we have more capacity. If our capacity is reached every day, then we will never be nimble enough to gain or keep customers.

Schedule your idle time, rather than letting your idle time schedule you.