Organizing to Improve Productivity

So the art of productivity is sort of interesting because I get asked into companies and one of the things you hear so often in a company is we need to do more with less and I love that productivity to me that sort of torture.

My perspective and it sort of fits in with my one hour work day is how you do less and get more. How do you feel about the leverage point is so to me productivity isn’t about speeding things up or working harder any of that it’s actually figuring out the leverage point and there’s an old joke – I won’t tell the whole joke because everybody knows this joke, but it’s basically about a package center where conveyer belts moving packages around and it stops working and they try to fix it basically bring this guy who goes in with a screwdriver turns one screw and everything starts working so when they ask for the bill they say okay we’re so excited you solve the problem give us the invoice and so he sent them the invoice for ten thousand dollars and they say, “Ten thousand dollars!? That’s two minutes of work!”

So he sends an itemized invoice five hundred dollars for turning the screw and ninety-five hundred dollars knowing which screw to turn and that to me is the essence of productivity it’s not about turning lots of screws it’s the one thing that if I turn it is going to have a massive impact on my business because there’s a thousand things you can do but out of those thousand only one or two or three of them have exponential value back to me is productivity is not about speeding things up, it’s about having a hyper focus on the leverage points to give you the greatest value.