In Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, Jeff Sutherland shares his thoughts about how to eliminate waste or at least reduce it substantially in the workplace.
I agree with him that waste is at least a misdemeanor and wasting time is a crime. At the root of peak performance is discipline. “There can be no wasted movement — nothing extraneous — just focused application of human capability. Waste is anything that distracts you from that. If you start thinking about work in terms of discipline and flow, you just might do something amazing.”
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi characterizes flow as “an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he is doing…being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
Here are Sutherland’s key points in Chapter Five, “Waste Is a Crime”:
o Multitasking Makes You Stupid: Doing more than one task at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks.”
o Half-Done Is Not Done: “A half-built car [anything] ties up resources that could be used to save money and create value elsewhere.”
o Do It Right the First Time: “When you make a mistake, fix it right away. Stop everything else and address it. Fixing it later can take you more than twenty times longer than if you fix it now.” My take: Don’t spend money, [begin] invest [end] money.
o Working Too Hard Only Makes More Work: “Working more hours doesn’t get more done; it gets less done. Working too much results in fatigue, which leads to errors, which leads to having to fix what you just finished.”
o Don’t Be Unreasonable: Goals that are challenging and exciting are motivators; goals that are impossible are depressing and demeaning.”
o No Heroics: “If you need a hero to get something done, you have a problem. The need for heroic effort should be viewed as a failure of planning.”
o Enough with the Stupid Policies: “Any policy that [begin] seems [end] ridiculous likely [begin is [end]. If your office seems like a series of Dilbert cartoons, get rid of stupid forms, meetings, approvals, standards…stupid [begin] anything [end].”
o No Assholes: “Don’t be one. Ever. And do not tolerate it.” My take: If you tolerate it, you condone it and, in fact, encourage and reward it. Dumb. Assholes must be “stopped cold.”
o Strive for Flow: “Choose the smoothest, most trouble-free way to get work done.” Eliminate all distractions that are not legitimate emergencies.
I highly recommend Scrum as well as David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Revised Edition (Penguin Books, March 2015).
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Jeff Sutherland is the co-creator of the Scrum methodology and a leading expert on how the framework has evolved to meet the needs of today’s business. The methodology he developed in 1993 and formalized in 1995 with Ken Schwaber has since been adopted by the vast majority of software development companies around the world. But Jeff realized that the benefits of Scrum are not limited to software and product development. He has adapted this successful strategy for several other industries including: finance, healthcare, higher education and telecom. As the CEO of Scrum Inc. and the Senior Advisor and Agile Coach to OpenView Venture Partners, Jeff sets the vision for success with Scrum. He continues to share best practices with organizations around the globe and has written extensively on Scrum rules and methods.