koffl next back Author : Jan B. Hurych
Title : PARALLAXES
Essay: YOU CAN FINISH MORE THINGS IN SHORTER TIME (8)



You can finish more things in shorter time
(humor)

Do you sometimes feel the frustration from unfinished work? Do you have worries about your capabilities, the fear that you simply are not up to it, the chagrin for the lost hours and energy, are you afraid of losing your job just because of it? No, you don't need to answer . . .

I was like that, too. I blamed my boss, my parents, my enemies, my fate, I even blamed the Summer Saving Time. Then something unbelievable happened: I have found the real reason for all that: it was myself, me, yours truly. It's that simple and if you are like me, you may even profit from some advices I can give you. But then again, if you are like me, you may not . . . :-)

There are of course several ways how to avoid that problem first place, namely:

1) Don't work - that is if you were born rich. I have a distant feeling I already blew that opportunity.

2) If you work, try to avoid difficult tasks. That is not as impossible as it sounds. I know several ways how to do it, but most people will hate you afterwards.

3) You pass difficult tasks onto somebody else, but beware of his revenge!

4) Get sick, die or quit. Or join the army or some other society - but frankly speaking, you may get more than you bargained for and eventually you will also get sick, die or at least quit anyway. I you are a girl, go to convent or marry a rich boy. If you are a boy: go to monastery or marry a rich girl - unfortunately there are not too many rich girls who are also stupid enough to marry the boy without means :-).

The rest of you, or shall I saythe rest of us, we are stuck with our work, our tasks, our problems, our stomach ulcers and our insomnia. Don't get me wrong, what I will present here is not the universal solution , it's just a list of solutions and some of them may fit you as little as a glove fits the rabbit foot.

How did I find out all those methods? I used my favorite method: I call it idea mapping and it is really very simple: you get a map, any map and you keep staring at it. Continuously repeat secret mantra "gooseberry" (some say even the word "Londonderry" will make the trick) until some crazy ideas start popping in your head. Don't worry if it does not work for a while - it did not for me either. Actually, it still does not work all the time, but it cannot do no harm either: it isn't addictive, has low caloric content and it is 100% natural :-).

All jokes aside, my real discovery came with the single statement I have read somewhere: "Of all the time we spent at or tasks, the 30 percent of it gets 80 percent of total results." I grabbed my calculator and quickly figured out, that approximately 70% of our efforts will be then spent on remaining 20% of all results. pretty lousy, isn't it? Frankly, I could get that number without calculator, but I wanted to be doubly sure.

Now what does that tell us? Well, obviously there is some a reason behind it. The remaining 20 percent is either:

a) too difficult,
b) cannot produce too many good results,
c) it is mostly wrong or useless, or
d) that part of our work is plagued with too many coffee brakes.

So I eliminated coffee brakes. But it did not improve my results a little bit (a binary bit for that matter), since I did not have many coffee breaks anyway. Wrong results? I didn't have any. Useless results? Plenty. And here you have it, my discovery: most of our time spent at work is useless. So why do we still do it? Thanks to our fantasizing, or rather the feeblemindedness of our boss, due to our (or his) poor judgment, wrong priorities and possibly even because of irregular fluctuations of our mind.

Now let's do some mathematics: if I do all the time only tasks from the first group, that is those useful and productive ones, 100% of time could suddenly achieve 266.66% of results. It may not proportionally increase my salary and my boss may even overload me by more work later - hardly the thing I was after - but it can give me the confidence I was looking for.

Of course, you may find my advice dubious, impractical or even ridiculous. It's all up to you. But just imagine that you will NOT tell your boss all this and by simple postponement of the useless group of tasks (temporarily - you can't postpone it forever), you gain more time for increasing your output. Or if you prefer, you may still get same 100% of results as before, but also more time for your coffee breaks (as much as 70 % of your time :-). Isn't it worth trying?

But seruiously: you do not want to spend all that time in company cafeteria, it may only get you fire. Instead, you want more results, appreciation, even promotion. You may actually start right away, just follow some of these hints:

I am sure you will find even more effective was than those I listed, no doubt. One last comment: you may wonder why I named this article YOU Can Finish . . . . That's because you have to do it yourself , I can't do it for you - I can't help you, I am too busy right now. I still haven't finished the last issue of my magazine . . .