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A logical, if often impossible, way to be a smidge more productive
If you’ve even spent 11 minutes inside most white-collar offices, you’d know the term “productivity planner” is — at best — a massive buzzword. Most offices are set up around the idea that “busy” somehow is the same thing as “productive” (it’s not). This tends to lead to an over-focus on the quantity of work getting done (“I’m so slammed!”), as opposed to any indications of quality. In short: a lot of people use their time very poorly at work.
Now combine this with the second problem at work: unclear priorities. Execs want growth. They screech about new revenue streams, and front-line managers “pivot” to work on those ideas — even though 11 hours prior, they were told something else was a priority. The people who report to those front-line managers have absolutely no clue what is happening; statistically, it’s about 95 percent of them that can’t ID the company’s strategy. Meanwhile, these middle/front-line managers are mostly relevance-chasers. Their bottom-line impact is basically negative. All in all, you create a situation where 7 in 10 employees have no idea what to work on next.
Productivity planner? Hardly.
Can we make this better? Well, we can at least try.
