Beyond Busywork: How to Make Every Task Count

Big Picture

In most of our work routines, we coast along thinking we are meeting the required standard. After three years in the role, this became my approach,? until my manager had to give me a verbal warning.?

Why should you care?

Overestimating your performance and abilities is a common phenomenon which has detrimental results. In fact, a study by Dunning and Kruger in 1999 proved that people struggle to accurately estimate their ability, causing them to overestimate. Imagine the consequences of going through life believing you are excellent when you are in fact incompetent.?

Case in point

In my early 20s, as the lowest level contracts drafter, I was saddled with running around to get business documents signed by senior managers. The job was simple; add the document to a manual control, tip toe into a senior manager's office making sure you are invisible, leave the document and collect when signed.?

Don't be fooled by my clumsy approach and job simplicity, those documents authorised the business to transact in millions. It then happened one day that my manager was harangued in a meeting. The business hadn't been paid millions because one of those documents was never signed.?

He called me to his corner desk and quietly asked to see my documents control. The control showed the particular document was drowning in a Divisional Manager's forest of files. I followed my manager like a puppy, with him leading the way.?

?On our way from rescuing the document, he quietly gave me a verbal warning. To this day, I admire the grace of how he handle the situation. Never raising his voice or even attempting a long lecture, but the lessons were learnt. What lessons, you may ask??

Lessons

The critical lesson is the power of knowing the purpose of your different tasks. If I knew the value of those documents, I could have made good use of my control to follow up. Do you take time sharing the purpose of every job with your team, or you allow people to just push paper??

Many of us work without any controls, or treat the existing controls as unimportant. However, they are critical in keeping track of what needs to be done, and your performance. If you trust your own judgement, then you will easily fall into a self-serving bias where you think you are exceptional.?

Bottom line

It is difficult to deeply care about a role, unless you have a way to keep its purpose top of mind. How do you and your team keep purpose top of mind and performance high?

?Quote:

“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.” - Pelé