Being effective and productive isn't EASY !

We are in the process of shifting office and we are having a tough time. Every 10 minute job is still incomplete after 10 days. And its very tempting to just try and complete it yourself.

Our CEO Bipin, who is probably more frustrated than us, since he has to handle the issues, made an interesting comment. "These guys have done everything twice. If only they planned well, they could have got everything done so much faster and saved such a lot of money, thereby increasing their profitability." And I realized as he was saying this, that it was a 100% true.

At that point, I realized another fact. Many of us, definitely me seem to also do a lot of things twice and sometimes even thrice or four times. Image the increase in productivity and efficiency if only I could figure out a way to plan well and do everything just once, correctly.

I'm trying a few things to become more effective and some of them work pretty well.

1. E-Mail
I try and respond whilst reading it the first time. That saves the bother of going through them again and then replying, etc. The one I can't reply because I don't have some info or need more data, I mark. That way e-mail consumes very little time.

2. Paperwork
Same as e-mail. Ensure it leaves my desk asap. Ideally a few seconds after it gets there. That way paperwork too takes very little time.

3. Project Planning
Give the data to the team leads. They work on it, do the first level of planning. Have a look at it, modify it if required and you're ready to roll.

4. Project Tracking and Monitoring
Here I think I have miles to go. Although we have a web based PMS, its not as effective as we'd like it to be. It ends up with us having to spend a lot of time collecting data, multiple times. The data itself is usually created when asked for and hence majorly faulty, and projections are not as accurate and quick as they should be. We've started building our own PMS. We hope to launch it by April and then maybe then, I'll have nothing to do. :-)

5. Client Interaction
This is one place where I'm extremely ineffective and have no clue on how to improve. 80% of the time is spent in traveling. And I don't think at this stage we can build our own transportation system. Fortunately a large section of our clients are in the US and so we make do with conf calls. Next step, video conferencing ?

6. Doing nothing
Guess what. Believe it or not, this takes up the maximum amount of time. Whether its meetings at which you don't contribute, or just general small talk or actually doing nothing. This I think is where a large portion of time disappears and is the major area of improvement. Starting tomorrow, lets see if I can try and do a little less of "Doing nothing."

Any ideas any of you have to increase efficiency and productivity will be appreciated.

So much to do, so little time.