Have you ever noticed that people who are less anxious and less stressed work in a calmer more relaxed way?
Look happier people work better, FACT! And are 12% more productive!
Look there's so much research on this Forbes, Oxford University, Warwick University and The Economist to name just four.
I don't even know why there's still a debate around this, apart from all the research available it just seems so obviously true.
Is it our job as Scrum Masters to make people happy? Well no. Look we're not there to be comedians but we are there to help the team deliver value every day to our customers so let's talk about it.
Given that people are more productive if they're happier then to me it just stands to reason that if there's something we can do in a work context that would alleviate stress then we should do it.
We're not there as life counsellors but we are there to help the team deliver. One way to help make people happier at work is to limit your work in progress and reduce your contact switching.
This is or should be within our gift as Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches.
Having too much work in progress and context switching is proven to result in higher stress, lower well-being, frustration and anxiety.
They are silent killers and cost you a huge tax in throughput and results in lower quality work.
They also take an emotional toll on workers, you know, the pressures of juggling multiple tasks and deadlines create stress and anxiety.
Now some say completing additional tasks makes people happier but research says otherwise. According to a Harvard Business Review article about multitasking and happiness, time spent on tasks correlates with perceived happiness. They have another article worth reading on how and why to stop multitasking.
In his book Quality Software Management System Thinking computer scientist Gerald Weinberg says that context switching can reduce employee productivity by 80%.
According to Weinberg we lose 20% of our productivity power with each new simultaneously juggled task. So if we take on 5 competing assignments in 1 hour losing our state of flow cost us up to 80% of what we could have accomplished otherwise.
Limiting work in progress can halve the time it takes to get something done.
This statement often seems counterintuitive, do less get more done, and because of this it doesn't always receive the attention it deserves. But the truth is if we can have the discipline to actively manage how much we're working on at any given time at both the individual and team level we can gain the focus to get work done quickly with higher quality.
This means that by doing less at a time we actually get more done.
Focus is what enables us to create high quality work from start to finish. WIP limits train us to focus on moving things through to done as quickly as possible with as few distractions, delays or handoffs as possible. This includes meetings. When we have excessive meetings, particularly status meetings, because everyone on the team is juggling multiple pieces of work at once, it becomes much more difficult to keep everyone on the same page.
Meetings are not inherently the problem, the problem is because we've got too much WIP most of our calendars are filled up with status meetings. Many of us don't even have the time to prepare for these meetings during the normal working day and because of this it often takes the first half of the meeting to get everyone aligned on what is being discussed and what needs to be decided on to move forward.
This means our meetings are longer and less efficient and of course there's also the logistical difficulty of scheduling meetings which can result in significant delays when people's calendars are blocked weeks in advance, our work might be delayed because of the 5 people you need in this meeting couldn't find 30 minutes to get in a room together and make a decision.
It's worth considering the cost of delaying this piece of work for weeks at a time and not to mention the collective salary of everyone involved in a meeting and what they could do if they spent that hour delivering focused high quality work instead.
You'll soon realise that status meetings come with a hefty price tag.
Some people think they are great context switchers, often referred to as multitasking, but research shows that those who think they're good at multitasking are actually among the worst.
According to research by David Strayer, professor of psychology, at the University of Utah only 2% of people are actually good at multitasking which means the other 98% of us mere mortals are rubbish at it. Check his New Yorker article out.
In fact the more we multitask or context switch the worse we become. There's a famous test you can do from the University of Newcastle in Australia to see if you're one of the 2%, or supertaskers as Professor David Strayer calls them. For the rest of us, when we context switch it's not just productivity we lose, the toll is far greater than that. You can find the test at this Business Insider article but unfortunately it's behind a paywall.
Now if you're using Scrum, start by making sure you've got a product vision a product goal and a single sprint goal, this should naturally limit your work in progress but to help further put a WIP limit on your in progress work and stick to it, don't ignore it, try it for a few weeks and then inspect and adapt.
Make sure you do one thing at a time, finish it and then move on to the next thing. This reduces your context switching, stop starting and start finishing, as they say, well as David J Anderson said back in 2004.
By doing this you'll get more done faster and with a higher degree of quality, yes really!
If you're finding that you can't limit your work in progress or reduce your context switching my suspicion would be that you have some anti-patterns present.
It could be that you're trying to develop more than one product at a time or you've got more than one product owner. So sit down as a team and have a chat about it and find a way to make it happen. It'll be good for your health as well as productivity it's a win-win for everyone, you, the team, the organisation and of course the customer.
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