Nov 04 2009
Accomplishing more by doing less
Oresund developer conference 2009 started today in Malmo, with 120 speakers planned to take the stage over three days and 8 tracks per day. This year’s theme is efficiency. Marc Lesser opened the conference with a keynote titled Accomplishing more by doing less.
Doing more by doing less sounds contradictory, but Lesser put it in context by saying “our task is to get rid of the things in our business that are not necessary and finding what is the real core of our business”. He quoted Michaelangelo: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Lesser suggested doing less in these five areas, and people should try to reduce them:
- Fear
- Assumptions
- Distractions
- Resistance
- Being busy
According to Lesser, doing less in these areas leads to more effectiveness, more composure and more meaning. It leads to accomplishing more of what really matters. Being busy is now a cultural status, said Lesser, often being used to avoid tasks and questions. People in the IT industry are always too busy, there is always too much to do. Lesser compared that to a carpenter who doesn’t have time to sharpen his tools, saying that “when you work with dull tools nothing much happens”. Pausing to sharpen the tools and then applying the same amount of effort leads to more effectiveness, said he, suggesting that programmers are tools themselves and that they should take time to sharpen to be more effective.
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I believe that you got to first find out what is more effective for your business. You then do more of what works and dump the rest.
Interesting point about “being busy”. It’s a big challenge to manage tasks to avoid ending up being just… busy. I guess this is one of those things we just need to be reminded of again and again.
Thanks for reporting from Öredev – feels almost like I’m there
Stephen Covey uses a matrix with four cells to explain how we spend our time. He calls them quadrants. The X axis represents urgent items and the y axis represents important items. He says we spend too much time in Q3, urgent and unimportant, and not enough time in Q2, important but not urgent. Busy work falls into Q3. Spend less time in Q3 and more in Q2 and you will do less and achieve more.
|Q1|Q3|
|Q2|Q4|
Q1 = Important, urgent
Q2 = Important, not urgent
Q3 = Unimportant, urgent
Q4 = Unimportant, not urgent
Yes, Covey’s matrix is always useful! Good comment
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