Shift from Unproductive to Productivity

Just back a cou­ple of days ago, one of my col­leagues, Mary (not her real name), approached me and asked me, how John (another col­league of the same team) and I work faster than she does.  She is impressed about how effi­cient and pro­duc­tive we are as com­pared to her.   This thought was actu­ally fueled by the fact that she was “black-listed” by our boss of being slow in work and unable to deliver the cor­rect things since she joined our team.  I term it “bad lime­light”.  Things got worst with her being senior than me.  Well, I’m not that impres­sive but I just give her my piece of advice to her, show her some ways of work­ing around things and hope­fully get her on the right track.

For her, she has a cou­ple of things to address.  She is unable to achieve per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity.  Per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity is not just about the per­son.  It’s about Me, You and Sit­u­a­tion.  Start­ing from you, you need to be at the Me, know what the other party want (You fac­tor) and per­form the right action at the right time (Sit­u­a­tion fac­tor).  All three must be prop­erly man­aged to achieve per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity.  For her, Me fac­tor is def­i­nitely strong, how­ever, she lacks the aware­ness of the You and Sit­u­a­tion factor.

First, she is slow at work and always delay­ing work.  But not that she is inca­pable.  She is capa­ble but she is being overly metic­u­lous on her work, drain­ing her time on every sin­gle detail, result­ing in no actual deliv­ery (pro­duc­tiv­ity)… My advice to her was, in this first place, is there a need to be per­fect in the work?  Is there a need to know EVERYTHING?  Do all sit­u­a­tions require our 100% atten­tion (Sit­u­a­tion fac­tor)?  Does per­fect­ing the work gives you 100% reward in return (“return of invest­ment”)?  Is the reward jus­ti­fi­able with the effort put in?  We need not deliver what’s right at that time is suf­fi­cient.  UNLESS she intends to excel from what she is doing but I don’t think so…  She doesn’t think so too…

Sec­ond is her work­ing style.  When you are con­sis­tently unable to deliver results, it could mean that your work­ing style is not suit­able for this task.  You’ve got to change it to suit the sit­u­a­tion (Sit­u­a­tion fac­tor).  And when the boss is inclined to be a process-oriented super­vi­sor rather than an objective-oriented super­vi­sor, you’ve got a chal­lenge to align your work­ing style with the boss…  This is one of the sit­u­a­tions she is in.  My advice to her on this was to under­stand the boss more (You fac­tor).  Know what the boss wants, such as the process or objec­tive.  Do the things the boss want in a man­ner the boss is com­fort­able.  Be flex­i­ble and change her work­ing style to suit the context.

Third is her plan­ning.  She always tells us that she plans her work.  UNFORTUNATELY, there are always injects that dis­rupts her planned work. Lets face it, injects are unavoid­able.  If you feel that there are injects every now and then, then you planned for time to han­dle injects.  Do not plan the exact time that you feel that you can com­plete the work.  My advice to her is to buffer addi­tional time for planned tasks so that when inject comes in, it will be less disruptive.

Fourth, is han­dling injects.  She keeps empha­siz­ing how busy she is with all these injects that she is unable to han­dle more work.  Do all injects required our imme­di­ate URGENT atten­tion?  She han­dles every sin­gle lit­tle thing.  Is it nec­es­sary to respond to emails directly when it reaches your mail­box?  Remem­ber, if it was urgent things will come in a form of phone call.  Spend­ing time on this injects is counter-productive as you need to reset your under­stand­ing of each tasks.  Time is wasted when you are switch­ing between injects and the main tasks.  My advice was to pri­or­i­tize the impor­tance of the planned tasks ver­sus injects.  Also, when a planned task is to be done at a cer­tain time, focus on com­plet­ing it fully.  Do not switch between tasks.  Some­times, work­ing sequen­tially on your tasks is faster than multi-tasking.

Work­ing with her was ini­tially uncom­fort­able as work was not really deliv­ered…  But I over­come it by under­stand­ing her work­ing style and lever­ag­ing on her strengths such as metic­u­lous that com­ple­ments my com­pla­cency.  My final advice to her was there is no per­fect per­son, but only how we match each other to syn­er­gise our indi­vid­ual strong points, and to do the right things at the right time. Do you think that there are other ways to help her become more productive?

Related Posts

• Be Pro­duc­tive – Stay Healthy (Part 2)!
• Things to Keep You Busy on a Busi­ness Trip
• 14 Ways to Stay Focus at Work
• 4 Sure Ways to Influ­ence Your Colleagues!
• Get the Best of All Worlds!
• Influ­ence and Win All Your Colleagues!
• Plan the Day and Week!
• 5 Sim­ple Steps to Han­dle Tasks Effectively
• Put One Thing at a Time!
• 10 Ways to Superb Email Productivity!