“We have come to value … Responding to change over following a plan” – Agile Manifesto
My blog has been a little quiet of late. I had planned to post most weeks, instead I’ve let several weeks go by. I changed my plan to seize an opportunity.
I started a in a new role last month. After a couple of weeks of learning what was going on, it was clear to me that there was room for improvement. I don’t want to mislead you that something was fundamentally broken, but there were a dozen things that I knew were missing, I knew how to do, and I knew would have strong positive returns.
So I prioritised implementing those improvements over basically everything else. My partner has suffered with me working late and weekends, my football team has done without me, and I haven’t written a blog.
In the middle I was extremely time-poor. I had too much to do and too little time. It was stressful. Once again, I had a plan that needing adjusting.
The keys to having time are written about fairly widely. Saying no, prioritising, and delegating are all useful techniques, but they’re not always options. Obviously you can’t delegate if you work alone.
What does work is building tools that pay dividends in time. Investing an hour today to save 5 minutes every day for the rest of your time in a role is a great investment. Better yet, make an hour every day to automate or simplify part of your work, until you don’t have any more ideas.
So I had to improve the way that I was working in order to have the time that I needed to help my team improve. Which I don’t think was the least bit unusual. Having done it before, I had confidence that it would work, which saw me through the stressful parts.
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