As I mentioned yesterday, your work can be evaluated on two factors, its quantity and its quality. Depending on your job, one may be more important than the other, but if you’re able to improve both, that can have a great impact on your annual reviews.

Today, I’ll talk a bit about how to improve the quantity of work you produce. As usual, if you have any comments or tips you’d like to add, please do so in the comments after the article!

Ahh, the return of high school physics

When I was trying to figure out how I would frame this article, of all things, some of my Grade 11 physics popped into my head (Good job, Mr. Poulter). Namely, it was kinematics. One of the basic kinematic equations is to calculate distance. This equation is fairly straightforward at d = v * t, where d is distance, v is speed, and t is time.

The leap to applying this to your everyday work is actually fairly short (look at project management, it talks about milestones, paths, and the like). So if we use distance traveled as a metaphor for amount of work output, then the two ways we can increase d are to increase the speed at which you work, and the amount of time we spend working.

Time

Now, this is a blog about work/life balance, so let’s quickly touch upon the time aspect of things. If you’re not putting in enough time at work to complete what needs to be done, that can be a problem, and increasing the amount of time you spend there might be the answer. However, if you’re already pulling a lot of hours, then you’re not necessarily going to get your biggest bang for your buck by increasing the t part of that equation. Time is definitely something which can suffer from diminishing returns once a certain optimum point is passed. (If you’re trying to figure out what this point is, if you’re falling asleep on your keyboard every night, you’ve probably passed it).

Speed

So that leaves trying to increase the speed at which you work. Now, there’s a few ways to look at this. Let’s jump metaphors a bit, and move to cars (what, it’s still related, they have speed and travel distances, right?). If we want to increase the speed of a car, what do we do? Namely add more power, strip out weight, and make it more aerodynamic. Translated back to the world of work, that’s increasing your knowledge and skills, dropping the excess work baggage, and increasing productivity.

Working on the engine

Training can be a great way to improve your skill set and your resume. By choosing (and completing) the right training, you can give yourself more tools to work with when confronting the challenges and opportunities each day at work. However, there are a few things to be careful of when looking at training courses. You need to make sure that you’re not always out of the office on training, as then when do you actually apply everything you’ve learned? You also need to ensure that the training is relevant to your current job, or in line with advancement, or you can make the case for it. Sometimes thinking tangentially can be a huge benefit to problem solving, so don’t immediately discount everything that doesn’t seem like it would solve an immediate problem. If there’s a particular course that’s keeps tickling at your brain, look a little deeper and see if there are some other ways it might apply.

An important thing to remember about training is that it can also be beneficial to your annual review. If you’ve taken training that you feel might have value to the organization, make sure you mention it. Not only are you gaining the skills and knowledge, but you are demonstrating to your employer that you are interested in growing as a person and employee, and that can be a huge plus.

Dropping the extra baggage

Now what exactly do I mean by dropping baggage? I liken this to the productivity principle of Lean. To sum Lean Enterprise up in one sentence, it basically involves looking at your work stream and stripping out anything that doesn’t provide value to the end customer. This is frequently used in manufacturing, but can be applied to everyday jobs as well. If you are spending a lot of time on a job that doesn’t actually provide value to your end customer (whether this is a customer, your boss, you, or whoever), see if there is a way to eliminate or delegate that task. Talk with your manager if you’re spending too much time on database maintenance instead of customer calls. This isn’t to say that you’re going to be able to drop every unpleasant, seemingly irrelevant task you’ve got, but it does do two things. One, you might actually get rid of some of the extra weight in these tasks, and two, you show a commitment towards value to the customer, and I can’t think of a good manager who doesn’t like that.

Aerodynamics, more than just a cool word

So now we’re left with improving productivity. This is probably one of the most talked about topics on the Internet. I’ve spoken about my personal fave, GTD, in the past, and there’s lots of other systems out there, like Leo Babauta’s Zen to Done, and the multitude of tips, tricks, and hacks available on blogs like LifeHacker, lifehack.org, 43folders and many others. I’m not going to go into much more detail than that, but I’d highly encourage you to check out these blogs and resources, and if you’ve got more, let me know!

So, these are just a few ways to increase the quantity of your work. Please, share whatever others you may have, and check back tomorrow for the next installment, covering ways to improve the quality of your work.

Cheers,

Adam