Rethinking Productivity in COVID-19
Somewhere along my Public Accounting career, I became obsessed with the idea of productivity. In my firms, I realized what we were doing didn’t match best business practices. We could do better.
Unfortunately, my suggestions to the higher ups might as well have be a play act with GI Joe toys.
Change is hard and painful, especially for an industry that has been doing things since before most of our great grandparents were born.
Despite the Saying, Time Is NOT Money
Cultural differences fascinate me. For example, did you know in (at least parts of Mexico), parents threaten to burn swear words out of children’s mouths with chile? I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than soap poison, the threat I received as a kid.
One of the ideas that’s deeply entrenched in this part of the world is that Time Is Money.
This is very much an industrial age thought. A person would trade time doing work to create widgets that could be sold for x money. So time literally was being traded for money. Productivity, therefore, would be how much time you’d trade for creating a product.
Accounting and Law Firms billable hours is a time for money idea.
In a non-public accounting job, the employee manual clearly states that they’re paying us for 40 hours a week, so we need to have a butt in a seat for at least 40 hours.
But it’s not true.
If you’re setting up a business to trade time for money, you’re NEVER going to get ahead. You only have so much time to give.
The Most Successful Companies Skip The Model
Why is Bill Gates fantastically wealthy? Because his company created a product that could be made and sold billions of times with very little marginal cost.
So Time is Not Money
Why did billions of people buy Microsoft products? Because the business software they made led to people being more productive, meaning they each could trade less time to get more work done. So time might still be money (depending on the job), but each unit of time is worth multiples of what it was worth before.
If I have my equations right here, then thinking of Time = Money actually leads to a perverse incentive.
Why? Because there’s no push to do things better.
Rewarding Real Productivity
I’ve read a few articles floating around that companies that can no longer visually check in to see if an employee is in his or her seat is doing the next best step: spying on their computer usage.
This is stupid. Ensuring that your employee is sitting at the dining room table in front of their underpowered laptop does nothing for the company’s bottom line.
It should, instead, be a time to figure out REAL productivity. What do you actually what someone to do? If they can finish that task in less time, you should reward them…by letting them deal with their kids who they now have to home school.
Finding the Indiepreneur Way
I’ve been ranting a bit how big companies do things, mostly because so many are having a hard time transitioning to a work from home environment, EVEN IF their work model is conducive to that kind of work.
Fortunately, as an Indiepreneur running your own business, you can figure out your own way to do things.
This means that you need to think about productivity in everything you do. Doing tasks for 40+ hours a week might make you FEEL good, but it doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything helpful.
Instead, think about what needs to be done to be successful. I mean really successful, not just getting a bunch of emails read. Do those first. If you finish in 10 hours, that’s great. If that’s all you need to do, that’s also great.
It also shows that the more you can structure your business to trade something other than you time more money, the better. This, obviously, isn’t always possible, depending on your creation. But it’s something you should always be on the lookout to add to your portfolio of products.
