Meta-work is effort spent or work done in planning and prioritizing your actual work. As a productivity enthusiast, I make lists at work to jot down tasks. I use powerful IDEs like WebStorm (currently) because of their in-built features and community built plugins that lets me do things faster. But often these lists and tools need maintenance and that can sometimes take even up to half a day. And as the tool list grows, more overheads arise and as a result, the productivity gains become negligibly small in the bigger picture.
In this video, MPJ talks about his experience with tools and the distractions caused by them. If you don’t already follow him, you should. His videos are awesome!
He also talks about Johan, a developer colleague of his who doesn’t use any short-cuts in his work-flow and he was just as productive as anyone else if not more. As I watched this video I realized so many qualities of Johan are very similar to a colleague of mine, let’s call him Charles (because I didn’t get permission to cite his name). Charles uses Notepad++ without any plugins, he often cuts scrum meetings shorter when someone goes off track and explains too much. He replies in work chat only when he wants to (that’s the point of async work chats anyway) and is always to the point. In other words, he gets to the bottom of things by eliminating all the unnecessary details and tries to spend most of his time focusing on actual work. Naturally the rate at which Charles shipped was above par.
The problem with meta-work is that, doing it can induce a false sense of productivity. When you’re refactoring your To-Do list or updating your IDE, it might seem like you’re doing work but that has no real significance until the task in your list is complete or you ship code using your IDE. Working with tools can be tedious especially when have to upgrade regularly. Not to mention when a drastic upgrade to a tool you depend on disrupts your morning. *cough*SourceTree v1.8*cough*. Effort is wasted in tools and is not reflected in the final result.
It’s hard to know how much meta-work is necessary and how much is wasted effort because there is no clear indicator like a meta-work to work ratio. So to help strike a balance, I used a method to measure the amount of work I completed. In my workplace, we use Pivotal Tracker for managing sprints and there is a metric ‘velocity’ which measures amount of work done by the team at the end of a sprint. I set a personal target based on this indicator and I try to hit it consistently for every sprint. Over time I have been able to strike a balance between the meta-work to work ratio.
Meta-work is a great way to plan your work efficiently, but executing the plan is more important. By understanding the distinction between meta-work and work, and striking a balance, the productivity gains can be increased.