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4 Q's: The Myth of Productivity
Get your week Unstuck! 4 Q’s of agile inspiration.
Unstuck Agile
June 22, 2023
Thanks for taking the time to read our weekly newsletter to help you get Unstuck! Check us out every week for your dose of agile inspiration. We’re striving to keep the content in our 4 Q’s brief and powerful so you can get a lot of impact from a little reading!
Quintessential Thought
There is a myth pervasive in corporate cultures: if we keep people busier, they will be more productive. That is like saying that if we add more cars to the highway, people will get where they are going more effectively.
In fact, the opposite is true. There is an obsession with maximizing busyness without optimizing for the work that is done. In creative work, this doesn’t add up as we need space to think to come up with our best ideas.
Quotes
We have become a nation of thoughtless rushers, intent on doing before thinking, and hoping what we do magically works out. If it doesn’t, we rush to do something else, something also not well thought-out, and then hope for more magic.
The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness.
Being prolific is not about time management. There are a limited number of hours in the day, and focusing on time management just makes us more aware of how many of those hours we waste.
If you have time to lean, you have time to clean!
Quick Step
Limit WIP. Full stop.
Question
How would you observe your organization optimizing for value instead of busyness?
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