Overtime and efficiency

About Overtime

think that overtime is the core competitiveness of the company, or beyond the means of the opponent, is a considerable ridiculous the idea. This shows that managers have no idea the core value of their company .

Yes, the value of these products with no soul on the heap is only as fast as those who run. Their foolish and limited minds are indistinguishable, "fast running" and "well run". Product development is not a sprint, but a long-distance running, and even more like mountaineering, mountaineering is not faster than the strategy, than is the will, the goal is to the summit. It's not the first person who climbs fast, and you tend to be overtaken by the second half. For some dangerous snow-capped mountains, the people who go to the summit are usually prepared to do very well, and in the process of climbing to learn how to retain strength, learn how to step by step, never force the summit.

• conditions are a good thing, because conditions are limited so that you can use it so that you have no way to use brute force to do your work, so you have to think about using knowledge-intensive solutions to solve problems smarter .
• A workaholic often misses the task. They spend a lot of time to solve problems, they think can rely on brute force to compensate for the inertia of thinking, the result is to toss out a bunch of rough and useless solutions .

Just like a human manual loom, when faced with a large number of orders, a simple and brutal way is to desperately add people and work desperately to exchange for greater productivity. It is only when you are not staffed enough or the labor costs are too high that you think about whether you can optimize the tools and make a more efficient and productive tool.

in China, the cost of labor is low, and managers have limited intelligence and ability, so in this environment, especially in KPI and the weight of the numbers, managers are very, very apt to think that they need to increase their productivity by adding or working overtime . So, they abandoned the knowledge-intensive innovation, and the use of labor-intensive simple rough way, long-term, resulting in their own no longer thinking, leading to the use of human flesh to solve the problem.

Thus, when the fully automatic loom appeared, this labor-intensive company became history in minutes. There are too many examples to see history.

Of course, sometimes, we need to sprint or to appropriate occasional overtime, but this should not be normal and long-term, otherwise, this must be a kind of quench thirst behavior.

In addition, I would like to say a few more things:

1) If your employees are like the one in the software company's two management, like widget factories, with X-type people, then you only have to use overtime and add people this way, like the Great Wall and pyramid construction process, like Foxconn, The essence of your team is not to think about the way to manage it only with whips. So, you can only use "wolf sex" to call your employees like the low IQ of the Beast Act.

2) Sometimes, we need to go to "card position", need to quickly to achieve a thing to occupy the market, which requires overtime. Just like the floating-point problem of Win95 and Intel Pentium chips. But do not forget, you after the card, you have to immediately put the quality of your products up, otherwise, you will die very hard to see. (Windows has two teams, one team is used to occupy the market, the other team is secure to develop) Note: "Card bit" should be a valuable thing in some way, but we still have to think about whether we are using brute force.

3) In addition, some people work is life, life is work, so, for him, this is not a kind of work, but a cause. I recognize the spirit and the enthusiasm, but I still want to let such people reflect on themselves, there is a more intelligent way to pursue their own business? And not with brute force.

Regardless of the above, we can see that as long as you enter the labor-intensive, relying on people and work overtime to solve the problem, and addicted to the deep in it, then you will end up playing one day.

About efficiency

Many people do not know what is called efficiency, they think the efficiency is: Unit time unit number to do more work. This is wrong! Efficiency is not more than who does the work, but rather than who does the work of a greater value . The physical formula for efficiency is: hard work / total work. In other words, efficiency is the value of unit time and number of people. So, to improve efficiency, not to add people, not to do more work, but, you so many people have done a lot of valuable things.

With the formula, we know how to improve efficiency.

1 ) Increased diligence

• You have to ask your needs more, why should you add this demand? How valuable is it to do this? How many people can benefit from that?
• You have to ask your needs more, can you simplify the requirements a little bit, so that I have to pay less effort?
• You have to think more, are you working on a construction team? Or do you work for a decoration team?
• You have to think more about what is the biggest pain point for business and users?

On the increase of work, say two points:

• Like Steve Jobs, tell your product manager or business party that you are now talking about 10 needs, I can only do 3, which will be 3? Why are these 3? the source of hard work is not desperately doing the demand, but cutting demand.
• about creating value, what we want to do is not like Baidu's " Bidding rankings " In that way, transfer money from someone's pocket to your pocket, but like " British Industrial Revolution " or " Silicon Valley " In that way, the value is truly created .

2 ) Reduce Total

• You have to ask yourself how much time you have to do supportive rather than productive work?
• You have to ask yourself, is there a ruthless effort to reduce repetitive labor-intensive work?
• You have to ask yourself more about the ability and quality of your managers and employees to reduce the cost of your team execution?

3 ) to form a resultant force

A very good product manager told me that he was shocked to see the news that the two little girls in Nanjing were starved to death. Each of the parties associated with it said they did their best, but the end result was that the people were starving, and you could hardly believe it was true.

But, analogy to our project, it seems to happen again in our company, especially in large companies. Each team said they did their best, the results of the project is not done, the bottom team said that they only dry the bottom, has done their best, the front end said that they are only responsible for the front end, but also try to, the back end said they just back end, regardless of the front and bottom, OPS said for such design and deployment of their own efforts, I did my best. You will find it almost impossible to criticize them because they do, as they say, do well in their own piece, and indeed do well. But the end result is that there are a lot of problems with the product.

Therefore, efficiency is not the efficiency of each team, but the entire team is responsible for the entire product of the common mission, so that the overall efficiency. There is no overall efficiency, only the efficiency of the individual, and ultimately the inefficiency.

Overtime and efficiency