Do Your Job!

It seems that the old saying “less is more” rarely applies anymore. Everyone wants more. But when it comes to the job that you do, I think the old adage stands true. Not that less work is better (although that can be argued), but that less different work is better.

Practice makes…better

The primary reason for limiting the number of tasks that you have is simply because you practice what you work on. Just as an athlete doesn’t practice every sport there is, you shouldn’t work on every task that is available to do in your company. Practice the tasks that relate to your skills, and focus on those.

Fewer tasks to work on means more time, and the more time that you have to focus on your tasks the more efficient you’ll be.

Most, if not all, developers have experienced “dev mode”; when your mind is in high gear and the code just flows out. Any tasks you do can have this same feeling when you are focused on it, but that focus only comes when the required time is devoted to the task.

Less is more

Being highly skilled in a few key areas will bring much more value to your company than being average at everything. If your job is to do solution creation, and architect an application, I’d rather have you be the best at that, rather than being able to do that and front-end web development at a mediocre level.

I’m sure the people that depend on your documents would feel the same way.

Be responsible

When you start doing tasks that are not yours, you take responsibility for them, which is irresponsible of you.

As a developer, if I take control of architecting an application, I now own the documents and construction of the application. This removes checks that are in place as documents get passed from solution creation into development.

For example, if a document is not at a level that the application can be built from it, a developer should send it back to get revised. If I do both the documents and the development work, there’s nobody to revise it, other than myself. Chances are, updating the document would be ignored, and any changes would blindly go into the application.

To take the illustration further, doing this one simple task for just one project could double your effort required. As a developer you might get 30-40% of the timeline to do your task and solution creation might get 20%. Factor in all of the meetings that are needed to find the requirements for the project and keep the documents up to date, and suddenly a huge portion of your development timeline is chewed up with 10% of the solution creation work.

This just leads to more stress, overtime and unhappiness. Do yourself a favour and get focused, be the best at something and be responsible for your job, not someone else’s.

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