Business Insight Zone

That sentence, taken from the Marc Levinson article that I quoted yesterday, stuck in my mind after I read it.

Sure, it’s as simple as can be. Economics 101. But how many of us let inventories pile up in our working lives, in our companies, for ourselves personally?

Forget, for a minute, the literal inventories that sit in warehouses and stockrooms. When you stockpile papers on your desk, or e-mails in your inbox, or ideas in your head, you create needless “inventories” that cost you something — time, attention, maintenance — but don’t return you anything.

What would your work look like . . . what would your COMPANY look like . . . if you cleared out the backlogged inventories of communications, ideas, projects, plans?

In this economy, we don’t have money to waste, much less the truly irreplaceable commodities of time and attention. So what could YOU do to eliminate the “inventories” in your work?

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Here’s a related idea, taken from Paul Graham’s essay, “The Other Road Ahead”:

Being able to release software immediately is a big motivator. Often as I was walking to work I would think of some change I wanted to make to the software, and do it that day. This worked for bigger features as well. Even if something was going to take two weeks to write (few projects took longer), I knew I could see the effect in the software as soon as it was done.

If I’d had to wait a year for the next release, I would have shelved most of these ideas, for a while at least. The thing about ideas, though, is that they lead to more ideas. Have you ever noticed that when you sit down to write something, half the ideas that end up in it are ones you thought of while writing it? The same thing happens with software. Working to implement one idea gives you more ideas. So shelving an idea costs you not only that delay in implementing it, but also all the ideas that implementing it would have led to.

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Related post:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.

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Photo by Valerie Everett, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Category: Management, The business brain