Are you being productive managing your time?

I just read a wonderful article about managing your own productivity. Or more about a trap you can fall into when trying to be more productive.

It's a really great read so I encourage you to check it out. Yes, it it very long. It will take a lot of your precious time. And it will make you less productive ;-)

But that's all for good.

You see, this hype around being more productive, doing more with less. Is just a hype.

There's a limit to that. You can try different tricks. Be faster. Do more.

But what's the point of it?

And that's the most important question you need to find an answer for. What's your point? What are you doing it for?

The article mentions the trap we felt into. Doing more for the sake of doing more.

Having no time to cherish our lives. I'll let you discover it all while reading.

I want to focus on one specific aspect that was mentioned and is relevant to my blog.

Creativity requires some slack time. If you burst out feature by feature, if you pack sprints to the full capacity. You will only produce what you expect.

There won't be any time to re-think what you do, how to do it better (or do something else instead that would yield better results).

I have observed this in teams I worked with - every time there was some time left at the end of a sprint people started to wonder off doing some cool stuff. Stuff that wouldn't be scheduled but often resulted in better morale, faster dev loop, increase of quality.

Of course provided a product owner was not interfering with that adding new stories to the spring from the backlog because there's some time left. Because work needs to happen!

Also from a personal note - when was the last time you just sit and did nothing? Nothing at all. Just sitting and listening to the wind, watching sky.

It's the most productive time of my day for me. A few minutes pass and I'm full of great ideas, new connections, reflections, and positive thoughts.

I wish I did it more often though as I'm so busy doing "work".

PS

As Łukasz pointed out I'm referring to DIFFUSED thinking