Does it sound weird? For the first look yes, but in reality not at all. Are you asking how you procrastinate if you are working? Let’s explain.
Have you already heard the phrase “value stream“? It plays an important role in procrastination and specifically procrastination during working. It is important to understand what value has every single activity you are doing. Without that you are blind and you waste your effort most probably on something completely invaluable. From a statistical view approximately 80% of features in your products are without any value where 50% of them are never used by any of your customers. But you still spent a huge amount of time and money on them. And what’s worse, it complicates maintenance of the product, which is another cost you have to pay and invest your time. That means only 20% of features you are implementing are worthy.
Value stream is old technique proven by decades in all imaginable activities you can do. It describes where is a value in what you are doing and on the other hand, what activities/features are waste of your time and money. You can imagine that every activity leads to an outcome. Outcome could be product, feature, or something non materialistic like feeling, experience, etc. In case there is no outcome at all than you are just wasting your time for complete nonsense. Value stream is about identification how it will contribute to value for customer in every peace and part of development either product or service.
At first it is important to well describe what is your product and more importantly what exactly it shall do for your customer. Then you can take feature by feature and test how your customer uses such a feature, how often, how valuable it is for him, do he/she even care about the feature? Don’t base your opinion on assumptions, do a test. Assumptions are proven to be wrong most of the time. After you write it down, yes you shall write it down not just think about it, you shall do prioritization according to what value the feature will introduce to your customers. Obviously the highest ranked features are the most important ones where you shall put your effort into. The lowest ones are exactly the ones you shall forget about. Remember the 80:20 rule. Just top 20% of them are usually worthy, do your planning according to that.
Do you see what I meant at the beginning? Most people tend to work on features without any value for customers, because they just enjoy working on them. That means most of their work is a waste of time and more than that they avoid doing valuable work important to finish the product because they don’t enjoy working on these features as much. Sounds familiar? So what is the result? You spend a huge amount of time working on worthless stuff and even don’t finish it. At the end you have nothing and just lost your time by doing something you maybe enjoy -> you procrastinate. If this is not enough you can also be perfectionist and never be satisfied with anything = never finish anything. These two behaviors are killing most of potentially good projects.
Now the good question would be how to do it right. As described above. You shall do prioritization according to value for your customers. Never work on features that haven’t the highest priority. Take them one by one from top until you reach a point where the product is releasable. Really do it one by one, avoid situations where you are working on more of them at once. In those cases you will not be productive either efficient.
Releasable point is sometimes also called MVP that stands for Minimal Valuable Product. Usually just 1 or 2 features are enough. But you have to say what the product is for and what is the core functionality. Again from the perspective of the customer, not your own. When you have this done even though you see it is not finished and far from ideal state RELEASE IT. It is the most important thing you have to do.
Release will bring you several different and valuable achievements. First of all, congratulations, you did that you have your product. Then you will hear and hopefully you will listen to opinions and feedback from your customers. Listen to them carefully, they will tell you what to do and where the value is. So update your prioritization according to their inputs. It also means you have something to show and demonstrate so marketing will be way more easier. There is lots and lots of other stuff but that is not the point of this post.
As next step there shall be iterative development from top priority, adjustment according to input. Be ok that you have to rework, change or completely remove some stuff that you consider worthy but your customers don’t.
In conclusion, be aware of what you are doing and why, what value is in your activity and don’t waste your time on worthless things.
