For most of my career I’ve been careful to weed out slack time from my schedule. If I find myself chatting at the water cooler a little alarm bell goes off. If I finish a task shortly before lunch I go hunting a small thing to do that improves the work place in some easily recognizable way. The list could go on. As a consequence I’ve intentionally taken personal time and dedicated it to learning, either through experimentation with things that could eventually benefit my career or through training in topics that have a clear payback.
Today I found two new resources which are making me rethink the approach and causing me to question how businesses operates (or should, if I were the King of France).
The first is the publicly available Scrum Guides, which helped me setup my new Scrum Board. I forgot a task for a client and discovered the problem this morning. “Never again!” I said – and promptly wrote 6 tasks on post-its. Then I started hunting a board, and built the Backlog, Doing, and Done sections. Avast!
While I was trying to find/remember the section titles I found the scrum.org web site. On the resources page there are reflections on the use of Scrum in the world and one caught my eye. “The Deadly Disease of the Focus Factor” by Henrik Berglund is a nice article which challenges my traditional view of slack time.
If someone is successful at minimizing slack time in their schedule through the generation of or direct management toward deliverable product then they have built a trap for innovation. Innovation requires learning new techniques, tools, and environmental awareness. Learning takes time, and not all of it should be highly structured activity.
I’ll be thinking about this topic more as time becomes available and add comments if any more wisdom slides my way.