Productivity is just not about oneself

Last week, I have been trying to reduce my total # of work-hours to see if my productivity improves. It did, because I knew I had few hours to wrap up my work, so I wouldn't waste my time on long lunch hours discussing about Kanimozhi's arrest or taking multiple tea-breaks to vent my frustration on my boss.

But I am slowly realizing that productivity is just not about oneself. Its about the entire ecosystem. I had to elevate a piece of my code to User Acceptance Testing environment. And this was quite an urgent requirement and so wasn't a planned one. Now, even though I finished testing the code; the code couldn't get moved because of the frustrating bugs in a software development life cycle - "processes". So my productivity was based on the "process" productivity. There is "system" productivity, "team" productivity, "hardware" productivity and "off-shoring" productivity.

If your manager asks you to improve your productivity,ask him to:

1. Bring shortage or scarcity into the team
2. Show proof that its because of one person's productivity, the results are not achieved.

Is adopting scarcity a good strategy?

Yesterday, my apartment management stuck a poster which read

"Tomorrow, shutdown of water services between 8 AM and 12:30 PM due to repairs. Inconvenience regretted".

This water scarcity for 4 hours made me to wake up early and take my shower quickly. It forced me to use water conservatively for the next 4 hours till the supply was back. When I reflected back, I noticed that my day was productive, because of one little thing. The shortage. The scarcity.

So if I bring in scarcity into my everyday working style, will it improve my productivity? If I reduce my work time to 5 hours, will it improve the way I do my things? If I reduce my team size, will the output be better? If I reduce my commute time to work, will it help me to reduce my working time even further?

My strategy for the next few weeks would be to implement a "scarcity" based working model

I am my own management institution

I am not an MBA. Nor am I pursuing one. I wanted to get one. But unfortunately, we have too many constraints to get a good MBA degree in my country. The first one is CAT. I don't understand why should one be so sound in English vocabulary to be good at management. Why should I know what "Ennui" means when I can always use the word boredom? And even if I use the word "ennui" to a prospective customer in India, what are the chances that he will understand it? My sister would always argue saying that I sucked in English and these are excuses for not scoring good at CAT. I ignored. The second big constraint is time, if you are working. So I decided, that I will be my own management institution. I decided I will learn my own management lessons. And also experiment them.

This blog is all about my personal "practical" experience learning & experimenting management lessons. Strategy is going to be my first experiment. I will be sharing my experiences implementing "Strategy" and watching its "Results" in the following weeks to come.