How To Know If Your Project Is Broken And 3 Ways To Fix It
When faced with a workload, there are basically 3 ways to address it.
You can slash tasks and agree to get less done.You can increase your capacity to do the tasks, which may mean hiring people and taking on overhead costs.You can automate and streamline processes to make work with existing resources get done faster.Thats it.
When facing crises, this might mean the stakes are high.
If that’s true, you may need to involve stakeholders to “pick your poison.”If you can’t hire more people and if you can’t decrease the workload, you’re going to have to increase speed or work extra hours to get it done.
This means your project might be broken!
If you’re working extra hours, something is broken.If your work requires heroism or martyrdom to get finished on a regular basis, your project is broken!
2 Minute Action
Take your pick of these three options. You may fine that a hybrid method works, too—using two or all three at the same time.Reply here with your hunch and let me know how you plan to execute!
Stop Praising Steve Jobs
If you think that productivity means getting the most out of your employees, you're not wrong.If you think that berating, intimidating, or insulting employees is the best way to motivate them to achieve their highest output, you're just a jerk.Steve Jobs is hailed as a visionary, (saw an amazing future of technology) a martyr, (he was booted from his own company) and an innovator (he invented the smartphone as we know it).What we fail to ask is: could he have been these things AND courteous to others?It's really up to you if you believe one precludes the other.
2 Minute Action
- Write a card for an employee whose partner was just in a car accident.
- Send a text message to a teammate who is off-site, about to give a big presentation.
- Leave a post-it note on a colleague's desk to let them know you saw their sales report and that it was killer.
The more we are randomly kind to each other, the more we create the kind of community that can do great things.It's not just Steve Jobs who innovated, it was Wozniak and their entire team.Don't forget that.Go forth and do good, today.