Give yourself a gift: do less today

Be honest, when do you do your best work?
When you’re trying to do a million things at once? 
Or when you’re able to focus your attention on one thing in particular?
 
And by ‘best’ I mean most creative.
Most insightful.
Most valuable.
 
Yesterday, I was working with a new team, setting up their first project.
They’d done some things well: early work was planned in more detail. 
Later, less well-understood work was there, but not so detailed.
 
But one of the striking things was the vast quantities of different stuff they had going on all at once. 
 
They’re a tiny team.
With a lot of work to do and a demanding deadline.
They felt they *had* to start everything straightaway, to be seen to be making progress.
 
Of course, we’re all busy.
Of course. 
But spreading yourself too thin across things that are wildly different is a recipe for busy-ness and burn out. 
Not productivity and progress.
 
Give yourself a gift today: finish one or two things. Not half do lots.
Your stress levels will thank you for it.
Your boss might, too.

more insights

TGIF: Think of a Good Idea for the Friday retro

TGIF Or in my world: that moment of panic when you have to quickly Think of a Good Idea for the Friday retro. I have a love/hate relationship with looking back.It’s a constant thing in IT: you hold a retrospective every sprint.But so many teams use it as a moaning shop, whinging but doing nowt about

Read more >

The dark side of Amazon search

I hate Amazon search.It just doesn’t work. You search for a specific thing.And it brings you back related, but unhelpful, other stuff.You can’t even exclude things from the search, like you can on proper search tools. If I need a screen cover for a certain phone, I don’t want to see covers for other phones.If I search

Read more >

Undocumented tomato feature

PSA: reading this post may make you immediately go and check your tomatoes for a little-known feature I’m about to reveal… In hindsight, I was always destined to be a problem-solver.An untangler of knotty problems.A niggler at complex issues. Even when that problem is as commonplace as a tomato. Many moons ago when I was waiting for my

Read more >
Scroll to Top