Introduction
Recently, I spoke to a friend who does journalism. She shared that she was extremely unproductive at work and felt she accomplished nothing at the end of every day. She shared her story when she had to publish an article with me. I framed it using my favourite 4 phases of the System of Agreement lifecycle:
- Prepare (Generate): Research by searching and corroborating accurate information across disparate sources (the Internet, emails, Slack channels, legacy databases). Manually copy and paste information with source citations across sources. Break down industry specific jargons, contextualise and synthesise the information to generate the first draft on Microsoft Word
- Prepare (Negotiate): Play email squash to seek inputs and suggestions from senior journalists. Remind non-responsive and non-cooperative senior journalists to respond. At the same time, manually redact content to create different draft versions for different stakeholders
- Sign: Get final drafts approvals from management
- Act (Send): Manually type and organise email addresses into groups to send the approved article versions
- Manage: Manually save and organise articles into shared folders (not tagged for future searching…)
It wasn’t the writing nor analysis that took her the most time, it was the inefficiencies that took her days to complete the article. This drained her entirely and dragged her feet to work everyday. It wasn’t because she lacked journalism skills or had a poor working attitude, it was simply because she wasn’t provided the right tools. Over a long period of time, this made her doubt her skills, abilities and made her feel unworthy…
Analogy
Have a look at the image above, try using a hammer to drill the nail into the hole. It might get the job done, but takes more time with many more bent nails. Wouldn’t it be great to have a screwdriver instead? Same person, less work, less time wasted.
Finding the right tool
This reminds me of a situation… A few months back when I was developing on Salesforce. In the beginning, I used Salesforce’s integrated development environment, Developer Console. Developer Console was great for basic development and testing. However, it became a nightmare to develop, debug and troubleshoot when the development became serious.
After I was introduced to the Salesforce Extension for Visual Studio Code, my world changed. Development time shortened drastically allowing me to focus on higher order problem-solving tasks. It wasn’t that I lack the skill or ability, I was using the wrong tool for the job!
So for employees, spend some time to look for the right tool, stop wasting your time on st*pid tasks that don’t help you learn, grow or improve your skills.
Providing the right tool
I love this story shared by Simon Sinek about Noah working at Four Seasons and Caesars Palace. When Noah was working at Four Seasons, whenever any manager walked past him, they would ask him whether there was anything he needed to do his job better. At Caesars Palace, managers are always ensuring he is doing everything right and catches him doing things wrong. At the Four Seasons, Noah loves his job as he feels he can be himself.
I found this story fascinating because the same person had an entirely different perspective. In this article, when I refer to the right tools, it doesn’t just refer to providing the right things to get the job done, it also includes providing the right environment.
By creating the right environment coupled with the right processes and software systems, this frees up employees time for higher value tasks, creates a cohesive environment where teams work together and sparks innovatión.
Building the right tool
For product teams, build the right tools that benefit your users. If you’re not believing what you’re building, why the h*ll are you building it? Because your boss has a great iDea? ⚪🐘
Conclusion
One of my biggest takeaways is to assess whether I’m using the right tool for the job. With technology advances these days, there are so many online tools to improve and even automate my work processes. Something I definitely think about before starting the job.
So… are you using the right tool for your job?
