Your productivity depends on the quicker and better you do something. And this depends on your workflow. The more streamlined it is, the faster you would move and the better you become.
Let’s say you have to reach from point A to point B. There are 3 path-ways to choose from. Which one would you choose? Let me know in the comments below.
I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t choose route 3. Because that’s clearly the longest. And that’s not the problem. The problem always lies when you have to make a choice between two very probably paths. The only difference between them is the hidden obstructions.
Many times the obstructions are not clearly visible.
We rely on our feeble judgements to make the choice. And they are only right 50% of the time. After that, we make another mistake. We fell into the comfort trap. Once we have reached the goal via one path, we try to fit the same path everywhere whenever we face a similar task.
What is the better way?
Record and document.
Whenever you are doing a thing for the first time, try to document every step that you had to do to accomplish that task. Once you have documentation for your actions, you would have some data points to analyse them. It is like directing a movie that you have already watched before. You have the output, you know the flaws and now you can make sure to eliminate those.
This way you make your task more streamlined by reducing the obstructions and making your life easy.
Real life example from my books
When I first started programming, I took a lot of time to build the simplest of the application. If I have to make those same applications now, from scratch, it would only take me 10% of the time.
The reason is that I already know the problems and loopholes.
There’s more… Over time I have built a library of functions and commonly used workflows (from all different places) that I can simply fit in the right place to make it work. I won’t be spending time to re-build the entire thing. It will be more like assembling different pieces in the right place. And that will be my workflow. I would reduce the obstruction and thus increase my productivity.
Always be thinking about the ways of reducing obstructions whichever work has been assigned to you. I would say, spend some time understanding the task and then create a workflow, and once you start with your task you will have everything at your disposable and you wouldn’t have to switch context and that would greatly increase your productivity.
Thanks for reading.
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