Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 23 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Minimal effort means avoiding work
— From 10-Minute Reflections: One Month Of Daily Exercises That Will Spark Growth In Your Business by Graham Binks
This book is a very quick read of daily exercises to make us think about business in a different way. The author, Graham Binks, is an expert in helping businesses get the best out of their technology investments. He has worked with numerous business leaders, who often ask, “How do we know we’re doing enough?” To what his answer is, “Start by making sure you’re not doing too much.”
Whaaaaaat?!
Yes. To optimize processes, you and your team need to be doing the minimal effort necessary. But please note that this doesn’t mean a mediocre effort at all—on the contrary—it means the best effort without wasting any of it. Thus, avoiding work that turns out to be unnecessary and wasteful, and that could be geared to other productive efforts instead.
Binks shares that when you are planning a successful outcome and think through the steps required in the process, you’ll naturally go from start to finish. And when you’re repeating work that someone in your team has done in the past, they can vouch for the steps taken previously.
“But if you haven’t perfected this kind of work (or your team hasn’t experienced it at all), there’ll be guesswork in the plan. And with guesswork comes extraneous effort.” In his experience, Binks has seen many plans that specified work that turned out to be detached from the critical outcomes of the project.
Thus, he offers a simple review exercise for you and your team “to make sure your projects aren’t wasteful.” This works best with projects when the planning phase is nearly finished—before the actual work starts—or you can apply it as a debriefing exercise on finished projects to see what will work best in the future.
Exercise: Being Minimalist
1. List the 10 project activities that took the most effort to complete in the following way:
#1 _________________ Rank___ Skip?___
#2 _________________ Rank___ Skip?___
Etc.
2. Above, rank these activities by their importance to the project outcome—highest contribution to lowest.
3. Starting with the lowest ranked activity, ask whether the project would have been a success if this activity had been skipped.
If the answer is “Yes!”, congratulations. You’ve found an activity that is not required on the plan. Take it out and save everyone time and energy. Then repeat the exercise with the next activity up the list.
Sometimes, what seems to be a simple exercise can reveal profound inefficiencies. Hope this helps optimize your projects and simplify your effort for a better outcome!
ACTION
TODAY: Think of a project you’re about to start or one that you repeat often. Go through this exercise to find the optimal path to completion.
FUTURE: As you’re planning for projects, or as you finish them, go through this exercise to make sure you’re not doing too much (avoiding wasteful efforts) and your project is running as optimally and as smoothly as possible!
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