Stop doing half-actions
Jens Poder has a great piece on productivity / multi tasking, Stop doing half-actions
One of the main productivity tips I have been given is this: eliminate half-actions in your daily habits. Focus on getting the job done to a level, where the value of the job is achieved.
"It's only the last turn of a bolt that tightens it - the rest is just movement." - Shigeo Shingo
It's particularly embarrassing for me to post this, as the article has been sitting in my "blog this" queue for several days. I keep looking at it, thinking I'd better get started. Or I get it copied into my editor and write a sentence or two before my tightly-wound mind jumps over to something else. Having this article in front of me has forced me to think about those half-actions. How many emails do I have half-written? How many websites do I have open where I'd like to do something with the content (mostly blogging about it)? How many documents and applications are open with work partially completed?
Why is this so important? As someone who wants to contribute to my company and to the world around me, I have to remember that a half-action is just a lot of movement. It's the last step that is the contribution.
Half-completed knowledgework doesn’t mature with age, like fine wine. It gets stale and crumbles like bread. Stop a couple of times every day, and ask yourself: “Am I about to complete this?”
3 Comment(s)
said:
perhaps 'knowledge work' is uniquely concerned with finding, reasoning about, and creating half-actions... or put another way, half-action is the domain of knowledge work as constructing one's design of meaning is never conclusive and never completed and neither is convincing the next knowledge worker!
Hi There.
Thank you for mentioning my article Jack :)
@Forrest Christian...
I think you have a point about some phases of knowledge work. While ideas are slowly taking root, incubating, call it what you like... that's a phase you can't force to completion.
What I was trying to write about was something else though. It's the tendency I have to start doing something and not finishing it.
Not because of some problem that occur... something I need to ponder about until some particle of inspiration collide with my brain. No! Because I couldn't manifest the effort to confine my ideas in some solid valuable form before switching my attention to something else. And with that switch a significant part of my inner mental solution structure was lost.
Sometimes it's better to leave something and get back to it later. But this break comes at a price. If you do it all the time, you're likely to be far less productive in my opinion.
I don't think knowledge work is very much like writing poems. I think knowledge work needs inspiration, but also a lot of perspiration.
Thank you for responding.
- Jens Poder
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It's not true that "Half-completed knowledgework doesn’t mature with age": mental work is not mechanistic, no matter what people who live in the Organizational Work domain believe. (Which is why they have to put R&D in a separate group.) Great poets have a great deal of "half-actions". It is the mental work of struggling with one poem, which never works, that leads to the achievement in another. That half-action did not go stale but led to a great achievement.
Not all work is tightening bolts, nor should all bolts be tightened. Sometimes it is the final crank on that bolt that breaks the machine.