Happy Friday,

I've been working on growing my skillset in marketing lately. Marketing is my biggest weakness by far. In the past two months I've taken 4 online classes, read a book, and started to put some of that new information to work on my website.

Here's a little nugget that I got to relearn—the most valuable thing is usually the least comfortable to do, and the least valuable is probably what is easiest. I know that is true in this case, too, and instead of writing new articles based on what I learned, I spent a few days re-organizing my website.

This pattern of focusing on what is already easy and comfortable is what most groups do when they want to be more efficient or productive. They focus on task-level efficiency. If your task was to write emails, there would be an obsession with how you specifically send emails and the tools you use to send emails.

The problem is that most of the time, task-level efficiency hits a point of diminishing returns rather quickly. You can only squeeze so much out of task optimization.

Where most people miss the biggest gains isn't in the task but in the time in between them. Becoming ultra-efficient in email sending hardly matters if you're stuck waiting a week for the final wording on each email.

This is more commonly called "Wait time."

Wait time is the time from when one step is finished and the next begins. In most processes, this wait time matches and exceeds the time it took to do each task.

Let me give a software example since that's what I think a lot of us know. A software team can get work through their process in 10 days total. Development takes 3 days, review takes 1, and testing takes 1. All of the rest of the time is spent waiting.

The tendency here is to say testing is too slow, to get more people, tools, and resources. Code review takes too long, so assign people to it, and coding is too long, so split tasks.

A far better answer is to look at the wait time between each step and attempt to eliminate it. One of the quickest ways to do this is to build some Slack. Let someone float. They will be instantly available to help with things as they finish.

Obviously, the idea of having someone doing nothing but wait sounds insane, but let me ask you this: how many days of wait time do they have to eliminate before it is worth it?

If you look at it from that angle, their idleness pays for itself very quickly.

Sincerely,

Ryan