Here’s an observation that I made some years ago when comparing productive and less productive people.
Highly productive people don’t complete very many projects. They tend to have plenty of them running, but only a very few ever end in a proper conclusion. The ones that get completed tend to be high potential projects with a clearly beneficial outcome. Yet the vast majority just seem to disappear into the ether, never to be heard about again. And this is hardly a bad thing.
Why?
Projects are incredibly easy to open. You can easily create a project every day, even every hour. It’s not difficult. There are plenty of ways to do so – you can buy a book or two, start planning a new website or webshop, fill-in a registration form to start a new business, sign up for courses to learn something new, and so on. If you are in a company, you can schedule meetings, create project teams, even go as far as hiring extra people who will carry forward the project.
But none of this is an assurance that a given project is a good idea, and will succeed. Furthermore, none of this is an assurance that there isn’t a better idea out there that could be a better fit and a better use of time and resources.
And it is for these reasons, among others, that completing projects is so damn difficult – and time consuming.
It’s one thing to create a project brief or hold a project ‘kick-off’ meeing – scribble down a few ideas on a piece of paper. It’s quite another thing to make a bunch of decisions based on these ideas, and then put them into action. After all, projects often tend to involve groups of people – not just yourself. This means coordination is necessary, including making sure everyone agrees on priorities, and continues to agree on priorities as things progress, which is inevitably time-consuming – and oftentimes outright impossible. Sometimes heavy-handed decisions need to be taken. Other times projects have to be allowed to die owing to the impossibility of reaching necessary agreements.
Unproductive people
Here’s another observation. Unproductive people tend to be those that are very uncomfortable having open-ended projects that are not possible to complete. It’s a kind of reverse logic.
See, unproductive people are often unproductive precisely because they are unable to let go of projects that are no longer worth their time. I cannot count how many projects I have seen people dump incredibly amounts of time and energy (and sometimes money) into, simply because they cannot let go of an idea they once believed in. Once they have started something, they just feel they have to finish it. For them, to let go would not only be an admission of defeat, but would mean their efforts had gone to waste.
Unfortunately, to waste any further effort on a project once it becomes clear that is not going to have a terribly effective outcome is the biggest waste of all. It ensures the prolonged unproductivity of such people, in spite of their high level of project completion.
None of this is to say that there aren’t some projects that are demanding, time consuming, difficult to succeed with, and yet incredibly worthwhile all the same. But being selective is key.
The 80/20 rule
Keeping the 80/20 rule in mind is a good way to get over this mindset.
The 80/20 rule is pretty simple. It basically says you’ll spend 80% of your time on 20% of your work. It can be interpreted in countless other ways, and therefore applies in countless situations, and has a wide variety of usages and variations.
For example, in a project context, it means that 20% of your projects will take up 80% of your time (and vice versa). It also means can be interpreted to mean that the final 20% of any project will in fact take 80% of the time (and resources) needed for success. It can also mean that 20% of your projects will be highly successful, the other 80% far less so. And so on.
The important point is that if you want to be productive, you need to make sure that the projects demanding 80% of your time are the ones likely to have the most impact – that best outcome and chance of success. So you need to be selective about the 20% that get this extra focus of attention – and mercilessly dump the rest.
It’s a pretty important factor to keep in mind when deciding which projects to focus on and which to dump (or leave for a rainy day).
This is why unproductive people are precisely those who complete most projects. They tend to be the ones who insist on completing projects before they can move on to the next thing. Since the final completion phases of a project typically take 80% of the total project time, it doesn’t leave a lot for much else – including other projects that may have come along in the meantime, and may have a much higher chance of success (that is, they may be one of the 1 in 5 that is in the top 20% of projects.
One more important point. While struggling with this final 20% of the project that is (inevitably) taking 80% of the time, quite possibly several smaller projects could have been opened and closed. Inevitably a couple of these will be pretty valuable. By allowing projects that just aren’t ready to be completed to languish, smaller projects can be efficiently opened and completed as they come along. Within these smaller projects, there will likely be a good many that are opened and dropped quickly, and still others that will be worth completing.
It’s a continual loop, with an ever-growing pile of incompleted projects (a pile that grows much faster than the completed project pile), that is nonetheless a highly productive use of time.
Or to put it another way, thinking this way is what allows productive people to work with a lot of ideas simultaneously, without fear of overextending themselves. Thinking that every project needs to be completed as soon as possible will have the opposite effect – even if they are able to boast that they have succeeded in completing virtually every one of the projects they’ve opened!
That’s the paradox in this whole way of thinking.
Does this apply to you?
I’m sure it does. I like to use the example of choosing a vacation, for illustrative purposes. Most people can name 5 places they would be happy to take a vacation in the next year (going to visit your parents doesn’t count). Now imagine that even though you knew you only had time to take 1 vacation, you nonetheless insisted on collecting information, confirming availability of hotels and flights, and arranging activites for all 5 vacation possibilities – only to choose the best one once you had a complete plan with confirmed activities and availability for all five. You’d have wasted an enormous amount of time!
The truth is you probably would do a quick skim of all 5 ideas, maybe investigate a few of the most important facts that would help you make your decision for some or all of them. Then you’d probably pick the best one, perhaps two, and get into the planning details (the part that takes 80% of the time).
Yet, this same sort of thinking doesn’t always seem to transfer to the work environment. Many (unproductive) people seem unable to apply the same reasoning to what they have in front of them. When they have a pile of projects sitting in the inbox, demanding attention, they all too often are unable to let the 4 unimportant ones go, and focus on the fifth one, which is the one likely to have a real impact. Instead they panic, and try to work on them all at once. Or worse, just take them in the order in which they appeared, without really prioritising based on their potential impact. Sure, one or two of the ‘rejects’ – the less important projects – may in time become high priority/high potential projects, at which point they should be re-prioritised. Until then, if necessary keep them alive with the minimal amount of work, or simply let them die!
What happens when your project is in the hands of other people?
I encountered this situation recently. A friend was moaning that he had actually cancelled a planned vacation because completing the project he was working on seemed impossible. The problem he faced was that the outcome depended on quite a number of other people taking action – a typical project scenario. Though he could put pressure on them, he was not in a position to force them to deliver.
In my opinion, his decision to cancel his vacation could not have been more foolish.
Even though he saw the project as being in the ‘closing’ stage, it really wasn’t. Anytime the fate of a project rests in the hands of others who need to make decisions and give input, it is not in the closing stage. In this case, though he could put pressure on the others involved, he couldn’t order them to prioritise this project. By definition, a project in this state is not at a closing stage. Only when all input has been received, and what is left is your own direct efforts to finalise the last pieces, can a project be deemed to be in the final closing phase.
More importantly, when the input from people just isn’t coming as quickly as you would like, take a moment to recall the 80/20 rule, because most likely for them it is a project that has fallen into the pile of the 80% of projects in which they are involved, that really are not so important at the moment.
Since my friend had no real way of knowing just where it was in the mind’s of others, or controlling this, the decision to cancel his vacation on this basis that the project was incomplete, but in the closing phase was foolish – and worse still, extremely unproductive. What better time to take a vacation then when a project is languishing somewhere in somebody else’s inbox?
In conclusion
Turning yourself into a productive person does involve thinking independently, and outside the box. Contrary to popular belief, it does not mean efficiently plowing through each and every project or item or work that finds its way into your inbox. It means keeping plenty of balls in the air, and focussing on the highest value ones, knowing that this ranking is subject to constant change. It may sound simple, but it’s not an easy lesson to absorb and understand if you have convinced yourself of another definition of productivity.
