Thomas Rolley 00:00
Should you track the location of your work? This is an interesting question.
And it follows from yesterday's session where we were discussing the differences between a kanban style tracking of work and a spreadsheet-style.
So if you haven't seen that, you might want to pop back and check that out.
But the difficulty or one of the difficulties with Kanban is that it may not be directly obvious where the work is that you've got to click in one layer.
Now, this isn't such a big deal.
But one of the advantages of a split on the first page, no click is required.
It's like a spreadsheet with the link bang and out of it.
Now, it doesn't matter which one you do.
But should you do it at all? Should you do it at all because it is slower to track your work means taking, it means taking that link, that might be a Google Doc and my peer's spreadsheet, it might be an excel in the cloud, it might be a link to your CRM, it might be a link to a Xero file, it could be anything that has a URL.
But by taking that and sticking it into where you do your work, you've got a couple of advantages.
The disadvantage, as I already said, is that it takes time; it's slower.
But if you are on work that takes a while, or you ever get interrupted or distracted, which never happens, of course, in 2022, it happens all the time, and you're distracted, or I'm distracted, and I come back.
And when I look at the work, and I haven't put in that tracking link, now I've got a problem.
Now I've got to think and go; okay, hang on, what was I doing? And wrote that out, and then go locate the file again.
Now, that might be easy.
It might be only 10 seconds of typing into Google.
And suddenly it appears, but I don't know if you've ever had this experience.
But sometimes that's not the case.
Like, oh, no, no, it was here, I'm looking in a recent way to go, I have no idea.
It just disappears.
And that search time takes no longer are, am I productive during that I am no longer productive.
I'm just looking for the file.
And if I took that three seconds to post it in, and that became my default behaviour that every time I did anything, the question was, where's the link? Stick that link in first, and then I've got it.
And if I get distracted, or the work takes more than perhaps the time available, or the workday finishes, or I get sick, and somebody else in the business has to come in and find what I was doing.
It's all there.
It's all there.
So this could be one of the most powerful productivity hacks you can come up with to that by having your team routinely take the URLs and stick them in the work project tracking, whether it's compound, whether it's spreadsheets, doesn't matter.
The benefit of the spreadsheet is it's clear when it hasn't been done.
Versus in Kanban, because you got to click that link down generally to open up the card to see what's in there.
Now you can miss it.
Now you can hide it.
So this is an additional reason why I prefer spreadsheets for project tracking spreadsheets being either spreadsheets such as Google Sheets or Excel.
But more commonly, if you're working in a business where this makes up a significant advantage, you've got 345 1225 people in a business, then you're going to want to look to that spreadsheet star Monday, Asana infinity, click up, there's a whole bunch of them.
But that insight that you should track your results, I would strongly recommend it.
And it begins with you.
begins with me as the business owner, I must do that I must model for my team what the standard is; if the standard is that I forget half the time and I never do it.
You know, that's no good.
But if the standard is that I do it every time and my whole team does it every time, then it gets done.
And one of the last little cool things that I want to share with you.
Let's say that three weeks down the track.
There's a phone call from the client, and they say hey, I was wondering if you've got that file.
Thomas Rolley 04:58
And there it is you bring up on board, the tracking board, and you found it 30 seconds work 20 seconds work that work could be minutes to half hour to an hour to find that file.
It could be lost.
It's far from the front of my mind three weeks, six weeks, and three months ago.
Also, what about if there was a change, there was a requirement for an intermediate step to be changed?
And you're like, where's the intermediate step? All I've got is the final.
And you've got to go back and find all those intermediate steps.
This costs productivity, and guess what I'm paying for it as the business owner. It's coming out of profits, it's coming out of marketing budget, it's coming out of the business, and it's putting it at risk because the productivity is lower than it could be, certainly higher than not having any project tracking at all.
But lower than routinely taking that three seconds to grab the URL and stick it into the boards so that you can find it, I can find it the other team members can find it.
It can be tracked two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, or eight weeks in the past, it can be handed over cleanly, it can be found by another team member quickly, massive advantages to making this one small change, and that is that you track your work.
You grab whatever you're working on and stick it into the project management.
And that should make a massive difference to your productivity.
If you need help setting this up.
You want to know how to do this in the most effective way.
Head over to systemio.dev thanks for tuning in today.
I've got a lot of value out of it.
Look forward to seeing you on the next episodes.
As we continue this journey into power systems create results.
See you then.
