Gojko Adzic

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.

I’ll be covering Oredev on this blog over the next few days. Subscribe to my rss feed to get notified when I post a new article

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