Paradoxical Advice on Doing More With Less
Doing more with less is one of those things we hear when money is tight, headcount is down and fear is in the air; in other words, current economic conditions. But is it an empty cliché or a realistic response to pressure to improve the return on our efforts?
If you think you can do more with less, then there is a realistic question headed your way. Why didn’t you do it before? No, there is more to it than working harder or even working smarter. Let’s examine the nature of return on effort in our work and how we can improve it.
Assuming you are an intelligent and hard working person, you are probably already doing a credible job of working effectively and efficiently. So where is the room for improvement? Lets look a simple checklist:
- Do less with the Pareto principle- The 80/20 rule states that 20% of activities produce 80% of results. We are often too busy to analyze our work enough to understand what part of our day produces what results. When our back is to the wall because headcount, budget and support resources have been cut, instead of “dancing faster”, we need to stop everything and take time to analyze our use of time and what results are produced by each project. To do more with less, you may have to begin by doing less. Focus on high return activities and prune away the rest.
- Delay work until you can do some planning- The story says that if you have 24 hours to do something, take the first hour to plan the next 23. More effort is wasted, not from procrastination but because we do not stop to think and plan.
- Slow down- The more pressure we are under, the faster we go and the more errors occur. Speeding up often leads to losing control of our focus, distractions increase, relationships are damaged and work has to be repeated. Worse of all, undoing mistakes often costs more resources than doing the project from start to finish at a calm pace.
So, paradoxically, to get more done you may need to do less, delay starting so you can plan thoroughly and try hard to slow down. Just don’t tell your boss how you achieved your results because this may not be the time to be bragging about doing less, delaying and working more slowly regardless of how excellent your results are.