The only way out of productivity purgatory

Collaboration is a wonderful thing when everyone on the team works at the same speed.

But that rarely happens.

Every human being has their own unique tempo, flow and energy signature. Which is why teams waste so much of their valuable time doing things like reaching out, touching base, syncing up, drilling down, digging in, circling back, following up, checking in, closing loops and getting on the same page.

And none of that counts as real work. More than half of our time is spent waiting for other people to complete tasks before we can continue ours, so we end up filling time with nonessential activities besides the primary ones we’re assigned to.

Certain people even make something called a waiting for list. Actions that are not theirs to do, but ones that they still need to know about. It’s a list of things they’re waiting for other people to do.

Sounds like productivity purgatory to me.

How many times has your work sat there and idled for days, weeks and months at time, simply because other people didn’t work at your same speed?

Sadly, human nature won’t allow you to avoid this kind of entropy. It’s inevitable. The more people you decide to have on your team, the more waiting you ultimately have to do. Which means there will be more inaction than action.

As such, there are only two possible responses.

First, learn to hustle while you wait. Master the art of working incrementally. Use those tiny pockets of time to improve your pace and results. My practice is to always have a menu of useful work that can be executed in short bursts of time, independent of other people’s contributions.

That way, when people whose speed differs than mine take their sweet ass time finishing tasks and getting back to me, I won’t resent them for slowing me down or making me wait. Waiting becomes working and downtime becomes less oppressive.

The second suggestion for overcoming organization entropy is, factor in nobody helping you from the very start. Take extreme ownership and do as much work as you can on your own, for as long as you can.

This approach is faster than trying to persuade your team members to interrupt their own work and help on new projects at the expense of other things vying for their attention.

Matter of fact, if you can figure out how to build momentum in your work on your own first, then it only becomes easier to collaborate later. Because the snowball will already be tumbling down the mountain. And the velocity will create a gravitational pull towards your project that other people can’t resist.

Years ago, I hired a programmer to help me with one of my software projects. She was highly skilled as a developer, but poor at communicating. She’d often go dark for weeks at a time, despite my consistent efforts to reach her via text, email and phone.

I felt frustrated and helpless. Like there was nothing for me to do but wait around for her to finish the work she promised so I could continue mine.

Eventually, however, I came to terms with her limitations and altered my response. Instead of getting resentful that she didn’t work at my speed, I started asking myself this question.

What if you suddenly no longer had this person as a collaborator?

This forced me to do a few things.

First, I learned how to troubleshoot many of the problems that I was unnecessarily asking her to help me solve. Which grew my skillset, deepened my competence and decreased my feelings of helplessness.

Secondly, I codified our development process in the event that we parted ways and I was forced to hire another programmer in the future. Which gave me peace of mine reduced the likelihood of starting from scratch down the road.

As usual, my goal here is not to put down collaboration. I feel fortunate to love my team and I’m grateful that we get to work together every day. I respect that those people work at differing speeds than me. And I understand since at least fifty percent of life is waiting, we should learn how to wait productively.

But I also believe that the majority of our work can and should be setup from the very beginning to be done as independently as possible.

We just have to trust each other.

That’s may be the only way out of productivity purgatory.

Whose work are you still waiting for?