Fortunately, Yourre Inefficient - learn how inefficiency can, sometimes, be useful!

00:20 - Let’s invite them in alphabetical order over to you Anindo Hi I’m Anindo Ghosh I do many things. But specific to the context of today’s panel discussion, I guess my professional history is of interest.

00:38 - I spent the 90s as an Internet startup entrepreneur.

00:43 - Beforethe. com boom. And I managed to cash out beforethe. com crash.

00:49 - My 2000s I spent as a corporate cog various roles from Chief Technology Officer of the multinational to director of a Fortune 500 Corporation.

01:02 - At the end of the 2000s I. Decided to break out on my own and the last decade I’ve spent as a freelancer.

01:10 - As an independent consultant, both in corporate strategy and at the other extreme in the creative fields of industrial product design and 3D visualization.

01:20 - That’s me. Thank you Anindo. Looking forward to your insights from the vast pools of knowledge.

01:27 - Next, we have Doc, a document in Bahrain, Spain.

01:32 - Talk if you do is off. Yeah hi. Um? As many of you already know and I’m looking at the list, we have many very senior CIO’s and industry figures in the.

01:46 - Session so thank you for joining. How? I have been doing this for 30 years.

01:53 - Initial 15 years I was in IT. But then I realized that the most commonly used product office is not getting as much attention as it should, and that’s how I focus on office related platform and the efficiency which can be extracted from it.

02:12 - So that’s me. Thank you though, we also have Sheraton.

02:20 - Yes, yes. Thank you. Good afternoon everybody.

02:23 - I’m sure it I have about 15 years of experience in the manufacturing sector and IT services business.

02:31 - I have worked at multiple layers and was also responsible for driving adoption and definitely we have seen a lot of benefits or positive outcomes from driving adoption.

02:43 - And you know in a positive way it has impacted the employee experience.

02:50 - And the user experience. So yeah, that’s that’s about me. Thank you Sheraton.

02:55 - Now when we come to the word inefficiency, it is a word that encompasses a vast number of topics.

03:02 - So I would like to invite Doc to shed some light on what inefficiency means in the context of this event.

03:12 - Yeah, sure, so I’m going to show you a very quick.

03:17 - Demo the purpose of this is not the demo and the feature which I’m illustrating.

03:22 - This is to tell you when we are talking about inefficiency as the word in the context of this event.

03:29 - What does it mean? I’m taking XLS an example and a very simple.

03:36 - Day-to-day requirement while using Excel so Excel is all about data and formulas.

03:42 - So when I put a formula, obviously we need to copy that formula downwards.

03:49 - So there are multiple ways of doing it. Some people will drag. Some people will double click, some people will copy paste.

03:57 - The question is if there are multiple ways of doing something, which is the best way? That is number one and if someone knows there is a best way, are they actually propagating that thought and making sure that everyone in the organization or around me or in my domain of influence? Are they using the best way? So problem is, even if there are multiple ways of doing it, everyone may not know all the ways.

04:22 - In my experience. 80% of population probably knows only dragging, so they have no choice.

04:28 - They keep dragging their using hands. Brains are idle. That is obviously inefficient.

04:34 - Now. If I show double click, if you don’t know double click, you’ll be very impressed. So you go to the corner and then obviously that saved a lot of time and you may think this is efficient, but it is not whatever time you saved by not dragging, you may spend in jail because it stops at the first blank cell.

04:53 - So assuming this was some tax you are submitting.

04:56 - You are paid tax for 44 transactions when you actually add 5000.

05:00 - That’s a compliance issue. Now those who have used double click obviously know that and then you have to bridge the gap and double click multiple times, which is even worse than just dragging.

05:11 - So the correct way of doing this is probably commonly not known, but the root cause is we are not aware of what is the last row.

05:19 - So find the last row control end is a shortcut may not always work, but somehow find the last row first.

05:27 - Once you find it selected upwards, now we’re sure it is the correct range which is selected and then freeze that range.

05:36 - Not by putting a named range, but by putting inside table, it checks whether there is a header and then.

05:44 - What was the problem? Empty cells, so I’m going to put some empty cells which are visible on the screen right now and I’ll put some similar formula and what happens it automatically copies now onwards.

05:56 - You never have to drag or double click or copy paste or struggle in any way.

06:01 - The other benefit of this is sooner or later you’re going to get some data more data.

06:06 - I mean, so I’m just going to copy paste some data next month.

06:10 - Next day it’ll auto copy. Now this is something which is dramatically better than the most common methods people use.

06:19 - But now it’s this efficiency in one simple context in a common product called Excel.

06:26 - That is the kind of stuff happens every day on every desktop, everywhere in the world. So in this context we are talking about efficiency being good not so good, favorable, not favorable, and in which context.

06:39 - So back to useless. And I think just before I leave, I think all the panelists can keep the videos on so that people can stabilize there.

06:51 - Open videos in their own screen, yeah? Thank you though. I think you’ve got a much more clear picture of what inefficiency is in the context of this event today.

07:04 - So with that in mind. Let us go back to the question which had which I had mentioned the other day.

07:13 - The earlier which is. Do people want to be efficient at work or is being inefficient beneficial in some scenarios? I would like to invite the panelists to.

07:27 - Let’s invite anindo. I think more than the panelists.

07:31 - This question is probably of interest to the audience even more.

07:37 - So why don’t we ask the audience for their views? Absolutely.

07:42 - Anyone has any? Please feel free. I think we can get it started and Indo from.

07:54 - I just want to make a quick call. Yes, this web and R for mult or multiple companies attending this or is it just our company? Multiple companies it’s an open living.

08:09 - OK, and I would the point. You just demonstrated. Why doesn’t Microsoft make this knowledge more visible? That’s a good question. The problem bro.

08:22 - I’m not from Microsoft. I think none of us are from Microsoft Persay, but from what I see.

08:28 - This is. This is just one feature like this.

08:31 - There are 12,000 plus features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, outlook alone an if one billion people use office.

08:40 - How much amount of marketing money would be required to teach every feature to every user? So I think it’s practically impossible.

08:49 - It’s just left to individual curiosity and willingness and ability to explore and figure out what is their best way.

08:57 - Basically it’s trial and error. They can put it in their documentation.

09:02 - It’s dead, but nobody needs it. Well, I I’ve studied a lot of Microsoft documentation in the last couple of months specifically on the Azure stuff and I actually found the online material specifically for sure is very good, sure.

09:17 - Thank you. To add to that what I’m.

09:22 - Office is not competitively and new product.

09:24 - It has been there for 30 years and most people got introduced to office in early days of their career.

09:30 - Maybe school college, first job and everyone has learned by trial and error and the work is getting done.

09:36 - So most people think because my work is getting done.

09:40 - Why should I check if there is a better way because nobody is objecting to the way I’m working so it just gets inherently inefficient.

09:47 - There’s no attempt being made, that’s all.

09:51 - Yeah, within within Excel specifically, I find there are a few what I would call Duff Duff cells or dead cells where you’re preparing some data and you you set up the format to be a certain way. And then there’s a few cells that it presents the format differently and I have actually raised this with Microsoft and they give me a rubbish answer and this is like when I install a brand new office scenario and I still feel those dead cells.

10:22 - And you have to think, why doesn’t Microsoft clean up the Excel? The template that they provide in the product? Sure. Maybe at the end of the session you can send me a sample file and I will see if I can be of any help.

10:36 - OK, thank you. Shop. Thank you Dave.

10:45 - OK. Do you wanna put that pull up? Do you want to get an audience full of before we jump in as panelists? Yeah, I think we can do it in parallel.

10:55 - OK, all that yeah. Yeah, because it takes 14 people to respond to the pole as well.

11:01 - Shop. So she says, yes, expendable.

11:08 - Yeah, so we’re doing a small just a small survey which we’ve put in the chat.

11:13 - Where we just asking a couple of simple questions.

11:18 - That, um. If there is a possibility of intentionally trying to be inefficient, and if yes, in what kind of scenarios.

11:28 - If you could, briefly. Give your feedback in that poll.

11:32 - It would be great so that we can take the responses from there and utilize it.

11:36 - Also in this event. And while you’re submitting that, and in the would you like to add something to the question of two people want to be efficient at work or is being inefficient beneficial in some scenarios? Chuck, I think I’ll address that very last phrase of yours there.

11:56 - Yeah, there are at least a couple of scenarios, maybe 3 scenarios where. I have found that there are advantages to intentionally being inefficient.

12:08 - Once that scenario is around organizational dynamics, if you will. A brief story from probably about 5 seven years ago I was consulting.

12:18 - I was advising the CEO of a company and I would go in once a week etc.

12:23 - It was engagement variety of different functions in the business.

12:28 - Um? The company hired a bunch of new interns and they also had the company also.

12:34 - While the company’s main role was not branding and marketing, they had an excellent branding team which not only did the corporate communications, but they also did the analytics that the sales figures in very beautiful graphs, PowerPoint presentations and they took pride in the fact that they did a great job.

12:54 - And then this one young young intern comes in and.

12:58 - Start helping that team. A month later, this intern incidentally happened to be from my alma mater, so a month later, the head of HR asks me to sit in on a discussion.

13:09 - They’re going to have with the intern. Turns out that the intern.

13:15 - Turned the entire marketing Department upside down by.

13:21 - Point and using a feature called Design ideas.

13:26 - To just take a keyword of whatever was being presented or would be presented by the management to outside etc and bringing in visuals images which were very appropriate.

13:38 - Very high, you know. International standard.

13:42 - And suddenly this 15 people in the marketing communications Department.

13:46 - But apparently starting to look for new jobs because they felt they were being made to look like fools.

13:52 - Because where the marketing team the mark on team would take four to five days to decide on a set of images and colors for a proper presentation, this gentleman would turn it around in 15 minutes and everybody would like what he’d done.

14:05 - So HR sits him down. I’m just there as a silent observer and they tell him, you know, you need to turn this down a little, otherwise your internship is over.

14:14 - And I was surprised the intern was surprised.

14:18 - Hi, explained that it’s not just about how incredible you are, it’s also about people who have built up a an equity within the business of doing something.

14:28 - And when you suddenly show up, do something in a much more efficient way.

14:33 - Now everybody feels that their employment for the last five years or six years in this company is under question.

14:40 - So in order to keep the organizational health, you need to be inefficient.

14:46 - Fortunately, he he took the hint and never did get thrown out of the company.

14:50 - He left by himself a little later, but that’s one situation. Organizational dynamics will often dictate that even if you know a supremely efficient way of doing something, if that supremely efficient way is an order of magnitude or more better than what’s already being done, you might want to tone it down a little.

15:09 - The other is there are certain rules business areas where revenue determines that inefficiency would be advantage.

15:17 - Specifically, in situations where the organization owns its revenue by.

15:25 - Body shopping by selling the Rs or the headcount of the organization to clients.

15:33 - Where clients will pay for that I’m sure, but clients are never or almost never happy to pay for Standard Time off which employees have or sickly which an employee has, or time taken for overhead such as filling timesheets or reimbursement forms and so on.

15:48 - So somebody has to fill in that time, and organizations typically are there to make money, so they don’t want to pay for the time.

15:56 - The client doesn’t want to pay for the time, so the organization tells the employee that you’re spending.

16:03 - Five hours in the day on client work, the other, let’s say another hour or two in your learning, overhead work, ET cetera. And maybe another are just wasting time.

16:12 - Fair enough, build the client for the entire 8 hours.

16:14 - Don’t finish things too fast because there are other people in your team who are building 8 hours for a given piece of work.

16:21 - If you start building 5 hours to the client, there will be questions we will lose revenue, so make sure your overhead.

16:28 - Is built into the inefficiency that you intentionally play into your role.

16:34 - The third, which I think is up, applies not just in the corporate world, but too many of us.

16:39 - Many of us panelists and many of the guests as well, which is that in our rules, whether it is in a nine to five job or as an entrepreneur or as an individual as a freelancer.

16:51 - Um, we can either be chasing extreme efficiency, doing things extremely well extremely quickly, pushing them over the fence to the client, or to ourselves. If you’re doing something for ourselves, all we can.

17:04 - Slow down, pace ourselves a little and use some intentional inefficiency as breathing room to think through what we’re doing to be creative.

17:16 - To take a concrete example, in one of my earlier roles, back in the 2000s, I was responsible for Lisa running with the legal with the legal partners of the company and.

17:29 - While I could have just the most efficient way would have been to take any legal document that needed to be reviewed and send it over to the law firm.

17:36 - Take what comes back and send it back to whoever asked for it.

17:40 - I made it a point to be a little inefficient.

17:43 - I would literally read through the document line by line.

17:46 - Yes, Spell check was there, grammar check was there. These aren’t new, but I would actually really read through the document line by line and time.

17:54 - And again I would either find something which was a lapse or something which could be done better.

18:01 - Simply because I wasn’t working from the most efficient template I was manually doing it.

18:07 - Oh yeah, DC wasn’t necessarily very pleased with me because I was spending time doing what they were anyway, paying the law firm to do, but which goes back to organizational dynamics, but that intentional inefficiency allowed me to be creative to add value which nobody else in the entire cycle good at.

18:30 - And. Yeah, I did sometimes show the law firm to be a bunch of buffoons, no names named. Today we are at least three scenarios where intentional inefficiency is a good thing.

18:47 - How’s this? You’re on mute. Yeah, so we did get a few responses and a couple of them do agree with you that some people think that their jobs might go away if they are efficient or if they if the overall majority is inefficient then sometimes the situation could get worse for that particular individual.

19:10 - Another good interesting point was that some people are comfortable with what they feel is inefficient, and they don’t want to explore a new way.

19:21 - Sheraton have you experienced anything like that? Yeah I would like to share some of my experiences.

19:27 - So first of all, let me tell you know what other impact or no drawbacks of being efficient, right until and unless somebody recognizes your efficiency right in whatever work that you do, it will always have an adverse effect or adverse impact on yourself first, right? Because it may be misunderstood that know you may do certain tasks before your delivery times and you may be busy doing something else or you know you may be browsing the Internet.

But the person who sees or Reno who supervises you, he may think that you don’t have any job.

20:02 - That is the first misconception that people have, right? Because when they’re being efficient and they can get things done faster but you.

20:10 - You’re spending that extra time for yourself or for learning something else, but it may not be seen in the right way.

20:16 - That is 1 example, which I have personally underwent.

20:20 - Another thing is, you know your peers within your organization or not.

20:25 - In your industry they may see it as an attitude or a bad influence for others.

20:34 - And in the right. Supposed to do an activity which on an average run it may take around in four hours, and if you’re turning it down in 15 minutes or half an hour then the others may think that you know you’re doing something you know which is not supposed to be done and you have to take that time so that you know you can maintain that.

20:57 - I know it can be either political or whatever may be the reason, but these are all the effects of being efficient, right? So that is one thing, and if you’re always being.

21:08 - Efficient, right wherever you need time, right? Because when you’re delivering it continuously, people think that OK, this is a person who cannot deliver things very fast.

21:19 - But whenever you actually need some more time to get one task done, and if you’re genuinely asking for more time, people may come back in the area you are.

21:29 - You really more efficient person or do you want so much time, right? So when it is actually needed, probably you may not get it, so these are some of the observations that I have seen.

21:40 - In my experience, and yeah, I think I think it’s also the lack of understanding from the other side to recognize your efficiency.

21:50 - So that is what I would like to make my observations at this point.

21:59 - Great, I think all of y’all are revolving around the fact that the time taken is the main thing which is defining the efficiency here where if you really look at efficiency then there is a lot more to it where there is an avoiding of the wastage of materials that are input.

22:16 - Overall the effort taken by each individual and the money overall.

22:21 - So if for example where an indoor brought up that one person could possibly do the work of someone else.

22:28 - It’s not really where the company can choose that.

22:31 - OK, let’s have this one person and not have the other person and come combine the work to give it to one person.

22:38 - Uh, but if an organization as a whole can aim towards efficiency.

22:44 - How would that work, Doc? I think you would have something to say on that since you’ve tried a efficiency adoption.

22:52 - Drive with a couple of companies. Yeah, hundreds of companies, but generally.

22:59 - The problem remains that. First of all. For efficiency to be involved internally at an individual level itself is a mindset change in an effort and then amplifying that effort at organizational level is not a technically difficult task, but it takes a lot of support and especially.

23:21 - I active involvement from top management and unless that happens on a large scale, nothing is going to work.

23:28 - I’m sure many of you are attending the session.

23:32 - Have not just office, we’re done. We’re taking office is an example of any feature rich product versus potential value to deliver.

23:39 - The reason we’re taking office as an example is because it’s commonly used, commonly understood and commonly misused and underuse.

23:47 - So whichever way you look at it, it’s a good use case to take, but that’s by no means a product specific problem.

23:53 - Any technology will have that situation. So when it comes to adoption, I’m sure many of the people who are on the call also can contribute.

24:02 - They have extensive experience, but generally there is a distinction between training and adoption, and many people actually are doing just training or learning or how to go here, how to click their views.

24:15 - This feature that’s not going to lead to effective utilization.

24:21 - Authoritative guidance about in a given business situation, which feature or tool to use in the correct way.

24:27 - That is what I would say is effective utilization and very few people have reached there even if they have on a long term basis.

24:35 - Very very few companies. Yes, yes Sir. Just to add a few points on what Doc said.

24:44 - Yeah, I think he really put it across right.

24:47 - Adoption is not only about training, right? Definitely it would start from training.

24:52 - That is where you start bringing in awareness.

24:55 - But when we’re talking about adoption, it is definitely ending at how beneficial you are becoming.

25:02 - At the end of that right after adopting to that technology.

25:05 - Or it could be a feature. So there are multiple facets to adoption, right? So it may start with the training, but it should end with a before and after comparison of.

25:16 - You know your process is how efficiently you are able to complete the same task with the same you know set of tools and not investing on new technology, right? That is what is adoption because you already have a technology right? Adoption doesn’t talk about introducing new technologies for every you know every activity that you do.

25:37 - So better use of your platform is what is adoption.

25:41 - And yeah, training is just one part of it, so that even I would like to put my thoughts into it, yeah? Yeah, while we are there, any of the attendees, do you want to pitch in? I see a lot of senior people from IT and other industries as well.

25:59 - Any thoughts, just unmute and talk or you can put it on chat as well, whichever is most comfortable for you.

26:13 - Alright, going there yes yeah. Please don’t feel shy, don’t feel any kind of obstacle to coming in.

26:22 - If you have anything you can even put it on chat, you don’t have to unmute and speak.

26:27 - Um? So we have discussed and overall. Co scenario of efficiency. We have talked about individual wanting or not wanting to be efficient, but that third example which Anindo had given initially about the gig workers or the Freelancers who utilize a sense of efficiency but have to maintain that median or the middle point where it’s not 2.

26:55 - Far from what the average people are using, he mentioned time, but it could be effort as well.

27:02 - Could you give us more on that aspect of it? Melinda sure.

27:11 - OK, um, so like I said I have one of the things I’ve been doing for the last 10 years.

27:16 - Is freelancing gig work? Most recently on siteslikefreelancer. com or upwork. com or I’ve also explored fiverr. com and what I’ve found is.

27:29 - That, let’s say a given type of work. So to take an arbitrary example.

27:36 - Resizing of a photograph, not just one photograph.

27:39 - Let’s say that a particular client has 1000 photographs that they need to be resized to a certain size and believe it or not, that’s a fairly common freelance assignment for people who are just beginning to get into freelancing in the creative.

27:54 - In the graphics space, it’s an easy entry, doesn’t pay much. But typically it is estimated that you would be resizing not more than about 15 to 20 images per R.

28:09 - Right, the client has specified what the final says to be, or you would be doing 15 to 20 images per hour.

28:15 - Now I go in there and like, alright, I have Photoshop. I can create a batch and I can convert these 1000 images in probably 10 minutes.

28:26 - Do I go right ahead and I pitch to the client that I’ll bill you for 10 minutes for this and that? Or let’s say I’ll bill you for an hour for this, and I’m being very kind to myself.

28:36 - Time and again the client will turn around and say there is something fishy going on because all these years I have been paying for maybe 30 hours of work to resize this images or 15 hours of work to resize.

28:47 - These images are not actually calculating so you can workout the numbers yourself.

28:51 - And here’s somebody who’s gonna build me an hour, so either they’re going to do a shoddy job.

28:56 - All there. Scamming me in some way so. In any case, in the freelancing, while in the gig economy, trust doesn’t happen easily.

29:07 - So you automatically get yourself eliminated from even being considered for the job, despite the fact that logically you would say, hey, you know what? Instead of spending, let’s say. $20. 00 an hour multiplied by 20 hours I would be spending $60. 00 an hour for one hour, so this should be a good deal.

29:24 - But no people are comfortable with that. $20. 00 an hour for 20 years, so you lose your opportunities.

29:29 - The other thing is. Oh, so there are people who are more efficient.

29:34 - There are people who are less efficient, but they fall into these groups.

29:38 - If you will. Clubs, groups, segments that if I’m going in to do something like getting images resized or OK for people in this group, getting a document review done, let’s say a training document or a manual to be reviewed.

29:52 - Grammar check style, quality of writing, verbosity, everything needs to be checked.

29:57 - It’s a very common gig work assignment now.

30:01 - If I’m going looking for really good people, I would be looking for people who are charging $100 an hour for this kind of work within the $100 an hour.

30:10 - People that I am routinely dealing with, I will find that they probably review about 15 pages per hour, so I have a rough sense between 10 and 20 pages per hour, and then I find somebody who’s in the ten $10 in our segment.

30:22 - Firstly, I if I’m already dealing with $100 all people, I will not be giving my business to the $10. 00 an hour person.

30:29 - But even if I looked at their work, I’d be like, oh. This person is charging $10. 00 an hour, but he’s going to do only one page per hour.

30:35 - Is it really worth it? The vast majority of clients won’t even bother to calculate, so clients look at a particular segment.

30:44 - So as long as within your segment you’re in the right efficiency.

30:48 - Skill. Which means you could be twice as efficient as somebody else, but if you seem to be 10 times as efficient, you’re going to lose business.

30:58 - So you have to tone it down. You have to take it slow.

31:01 - The economy, unlike employment, does not have even the little assurances of job security that employment does freelancers.

31:09 - A client could give a freelancer work today and give almost identical work for someone entirely different for a higher price the next time, despite the fact that they’re very happy with the quality of your work because they have no need for loyalty.

31:23 - So, given that you can’t afford to be out of the band so you have to pick your band, and I’m very good. I’m supremely efficient.

31:30 - I’m going to build a $180. 00 an hour, even if I get only five assignments a month and the other guy gets 50 assignments a month.

31:38 - He’s getting 50 assignments at. $10. 00 an hour. I don’t want to compete with them once you’re in your segment, you have to be as efficient as that segment is.

31:46 - And I think this is a make or break, and probably for people in the corporate world, this sounds like a foreign language, but those who are consulting or freelancing.

31:54 - I think there will be some. Bells ringing that yeah this makes sense.

32:00 - So again what you write rating is that if you are an outlier you could be looked at as.

32:06 - Not trustworthy. But in some scenarios, while as long as you have at least a few people in the similar segment like you said groups, then there is more chance of you getting more work or play or work be incredible.

32:22 - Yes, yes. OK, so. With that in mind, yeah, since you use the word credible, and I think I should have used that word myself so well put, I think your credibility has zero stickiness in the freelancing world.

32:38 - I know I won’t say OII mean alot of my freelance clients in the 3D rendering CAD space come back to me with more assignments, but if I’d been seriously out of band, they wouldn’t. Right, if I asked him to think that you know there must be a reason you should deal with me, they’d be like I’d rather not deal with you then think.

32:56 - So credibility has no stickiness. I think that’s an important point which you know between what you said and what I said.

33:02 - It needs to come across. Now with that in mind, is there this is for anyone in the panel? Is there a way in the corporate scenario where if you personally don’t know of the most efficient way to do something you can identify if someone is being inefficient or not? So using if I as a manager don’t even know a better way of doing something, can I identify that a subordinate is being less efficient or inefficient, yes? Shut it soon.

33:42 - Yeah, so it depends, right? That’s why I brought up this point in my initial comments.

33:49 - If the efficiency or the way that you’re being efficient, if it’s recognizable and it also has, you know we as individuals all responsible to make others understand that you know being efficient is good, right? But the same time as an indoor brought up right sometimes.

34:12 - In some places, being inefficient is required, right? I think all the examples that he gave is is definitely, you know, valid. Let me put across my some of my experiences.

34:23 - Definitely, you know, in our world in the corporate world we definitely prepare a lot of presentations or lot of approvals right for project approvals.

34:33 - Or, you know, we’re building a solution for customer.

34:36 - So that is where we have certain timelines to deliver these solutions.

34:42 - Let me take an example where I know I prepared a solution.

34:45 - I went for an approval to the management and you know I get.

34:49 - I got a lot of feedback, you know, but there is whether the feedback is relevant or irrelevant for that particular customer is, you know, is Secondly, the reason I got a lot of feedback was there was too much of time where the commitment to the customer was.

35:05 - For example, you know the commitment to the customer was that we’re going to come back with the solution next week.

35:12 - But I went ahead so that you know I can build that consensus with everybody and you know, we can. In fact we can build on this solution in a very robust way, but the way I got the feedback wasn’t very, very trivial and I ended up getting demotivated, right? So we have to find a balance how we were able to achieve that.

35:36 - And then I started learning that. You know why I was able to turn around solutions.

35:43 - And that is when I started telling my supervisors.

35:46 - Or you know, the management how I did that.

35:49 - So you know so quickly. I know they would also appreciate me and I would also not get demotivated right? Because once they give that feedback we have to again rework on the same thing and that is where we will have to put a lot of thought process.

36:06 - So I also would like to give one scenario right in this case where I would have I would have been.

36:13 - Better if I was being intentionally, you know, inefficient, and if I could have taken that extra time to think about what may be the feedback that I may get and you know, put that extra hours and then go for an approval.

36:27 - Probably that could have been a better scenario in in this context.

36:33 - Yeah. Thank you so soon. OK, so you were saying intentionally trying to be inefficient so that it is acceptable.

36:43 - Little Dave, do you have something to say? Yes, I just wanted to comment on Cher’s point.

36:49 - I’ve experienced exactly the same scenario you’ve just explained.

36:54 - Where, OK, I’m my background is ex military, and in the military you learn to improvise.

37:00 - I’m actually not a not a graduate, but I’m actually very successful in my in my role.

37:08 - And the question I have is efficiency versus quality.

37:12 - I’m absolutely focused on quality and very good documentation.

37:17 - Very attention to detail to me is more important than the efficiency my colleagues can do task quicker, but they don’t document what they’ve done and they can’t remember what they’ve done later and it’s not recorded.

37:33 - So for me, capturing what I do so that it’s repeatable.

37:38 - Is very important. My my boss objects to this on occasions, but I do it anyway because I think OK, I’m going to ignore what he says.

37:48 - Getting the quality and documenting what I do is more important than the time, even if it costs me my personal time.

38:01 - Absolutely. That’s a good point. Absolutely thank you to a doc you were about to say something.

38:11 - You know we should move on to the next question or next subject topic.

38:17 - You clean it. So since dear has brought up the difference between quality and efficiency, let’s put one more word in there and see what would be.

38:30 - How would you distinguish between productivity and efficiency? Stock, yeah, I think Charlotte sign is more qualified.

38:43 - Very very famous global auto manufacturing company.

38:46 - For a long time, so sure, it’s an overview.

38:50 - Thanks Doc, yeah I’m happy that you know Dave brought up that point.

38:55 - In fact, you know I would like to assure him that if you’re being efficient, that means it is adding quality to your work.

39:03 - Whereas you know there’s another point which is just product.

39:07 - I think we’re doing comparison between productivity and efficiency, right? Productivity according to me is where you have to get the outputs much faster right? Irrespective of what process you do.

39:22 - You know what tools use what resources you use, but whereas inefficiency you’re using the best of the resources, you’re refining your processes. All the steps that are involved in the processes, right? So the resistance of efficiency is much lesser, right? Because people are familiar with the tools.

39:43 - It is just. You know they don’t know how correctly they have to do it, but when we’re talking about productivity, people always fear about losing their jobs, because if it’s a normal misconception within the corporate world that you know, if you’re being productive, then definitely you know there are some heads that’s going to roll out, right? So that’s not the case, right? And that should not be the case, so it has to be positioned in such a way that you know efficiency is what we’re trying to target.

40:14 - And not the productivity right? Because productivity may lead to in a bad quality as well.

40:20 - Because you know, end of the day you’re just concentrating on the output and not the quality of the alt, right? So yeah, being efficient I would.

40:29 - I would say that inefficiency is. Is within the umbrella of productivity because if you’re doing you know things more efficiently.

40:38 - That means definitely you’re saving some time, so in turn it would lead up to no good productivity cells.

40:43 - So yeah, but that’s what I wanted to say. Great thank you for the time.

40:50 - And in the dock, anything to add? Or anyone else in the I’m just beginning to get, you know, kind of sunrise happening.

40:58 - Don is happening in that. I think a lot of what we’ve been talking about.

41:03 - I I begin to see that yeah productivity is just how quickly we churn out widgets.

41:08 - Whether those are good widgets, bad widgets, useless widgets is not really even being accounted for.

41:14 - Yeah so. Yeah, but let’s face it, in a lot, especially in a service nation in a service economy like ours, I think it’s a number of widgets that are all being counted that are being counted most of the time.

41:30 - Yeah, I’ll play. Volumes. So Doc, you have this concept on.

41:41 - How to identify inefficiency in office products? Does that apply to everywhere else as well? So you’re talking about the way of sticking your end inefficiency your own inefficiencies? Yes, yeah, but that will require some explanation.

42:01 - Everyone in the audience may not know that.

42:04 - So what the concept? I will tell you I will not show demo idea is.

42:09 - Like someone was mentioning, I forgot who that if I’m doing something everyone around me is also doing it.

42:16 - By and large the same way. Whether it is me, my boss, my subordinate, my competitor, Mike, Industry competitor, another country who is competing doesn’t matter.

42:26 - Everyone is doing it the same way. How do I know what we’re doing is inefficient or not? It’s a wishful thinking hopefully so everyone has discovered the best way of doing things by trial and error, which is statistically impossible. So forget about kovid pandemic if inefficiencies.

42:45 - The real pandemic because it is even checked.

42:48 - At least we check for Covid. Here in efficiency is so rampant because nobody checked because nobody thoughts even today.

42:56 - If you ask someone, do you think you are inefficient? Who will say yes? Why would they even say yes, not just to protect their ego at heart? I feel what I’m doing must be good.

43:07 - Maybe there is a little bit of effort fight in person here and there, but thousands of percent improvement, impossible. That is the problem.

43:16 - Becausw as a vendor who create software and I’m not talking Microsoft, any software or. Any widget developer for to be making generic.

43:24 - There is a need and there is a solution. So in software world the use case becomes a button or a right click menu or a dropdown.

43:32 - The user interface element. So now if people are using only 150 features and Microsoft is given 12,000 features, do you think Microsoft is not a profit making company? They were just wasting their time creating 11,000 whatever number of features because they have nothing else to do know each feature came from a use case that use case without even knowing that people are saying no.

43:56 - No, I don’t need that when I’m saying I don’t need that.

44:00 - I don’t even know what I’m saying no to. So that is, I would say it is not inefficiency, it is. Yeah, why? What would I say it’s called active ignorance means.

44:12 - I am seeing those buttons everyday. I know I know only few of them.

44:16 - I know that I don’t know most of them not knowing is called ignorance.

44:20 - Fine, but knowing that I don’t know. And being happy with it is called active ignorance means I’m OK with it because I’m incompetent.

44:28 - My boss is incompetent, entire industries incompetent.

44:31 - Let’s live with that. What is the problem? What we don’t realize at individual level, at least if you become slightly more competent, you don’t have to show that you’re competent.

44:41 - We got so many reasons for why showing off that you’re more competent, male and into trouble. Absolutely no doubts about that.

44:48 - You know how to express your inefficiency, has nothing to do with whether you want to become efficient.

44:55 - You become efficient than knowingly becoming efficient.

44:59 - Absolutely fine on demand, but at the moment you have a choice and that choice is entirely yours and it’s not adversely affecting you.

45:07 - You tell me if you know two ways or five ways, rather one of them is supremely better than the other four, why would any sensible person do something inefficient unless there is some external pressure? So I think division level.

45:24 - It makes sense. It’s a fun exercise. Life becomes more the same, mundane activity becomes more enjoyable if you’re exploring.

45:31 - There’s nothing to lose everything to gain, how to express you, decide that that’s my take on it.

45:39 - And then if you can influence few people, maybe it can grow into organizational level.

45:44 - If this is understood by senior people, that can definitely grow much faster and on a larger scale.

45:50 - But even there just because your senior now doesn’t make you efficient, your inefficiency came from school days.

45:57 - Now your see you, what difference? You still can’t copy paste properly? Right you of course having business experience domain expertise.

46:06 - But when it comes to office, it’s nobody taking it seriously, so everyone is inefficient.

46:16 - Thank you though. But now with that in mind, you are saying we need to know the efficient ways before we can intentionally be inefficient too.

46:28 - Make it more comfortable for everyone around us.

46:31 - Yeah, even before that you need to know what you’re doing is efficient or not.

46:35 - How will you find that out if everyone around you is inefficient, who will detect your inefficiency? So there are three simple ways of doing that.

46:43 - You observe what you’re doing. If it’s repetitive and not adding value, that means most probabilities inefficient because that reputation the vendor must have notice as a potential enhancement area or use case for their product.

46:55 - Second thing is whenever you feel you are helping the product rather than the product helping me like in this case you are dragging, dragging, dragging. Why are you dragging? Can’t Excel know how many rows are there? No it doesn’t because of gaps.

47:10 - OK we bridge that and then job done. So when you’re helping the software instead of the software helping like to give an example which is outside office.

47:19 - If I’m using Photoshop and I’m doing resize 100 times manually, shouldn’t I think Photoshop hasn’t Photoshop thought about? Photographs and the fact that photographers need batch processing, so I should. Guarantee in my mind that that feature has to be there, it’s just a question of finding which menu then I can predict features because I know it’s a mature product.

47:42 - It’s a feature rich product. Every feature is for person like me.

47:46 - I must be confident that it is there and then find it.

47:49 - So now I am going proactively and finding features.

47:53 - I’m not groping in the dark. And the third thing is, hands or brain. You are dragging, dragging, dragging hand was doing something.

48:01 - You will get arthritis. Brain was sleeping.

48:04 - You will not grow in your career, so any imbalance between hands and brain is inefficient that so at an individual level you detect inefficiency I’m sure are in the works on completely different set of products which are 3D modeling, graphic design.

48:18 - He may have your own generic ways of detecting inefficiency there.

48:22 - What I said is in the context of office. No, I think I think exactly those things apply in the case of pretty much every other tool I use, whether it is CAD software or whether it is rendering software, lucky Shot, or whether it is Photoshop like you said, or for that matter, yeah, I do some work on Ms Office also, so I think the same.

48:44 - It may not be my primary line of work, but it’s definitely one hour a day.

48:49 - At the very least I’m in office, so let’s not. So yeah, I think the generic definitely applies in practically every tool, and in fact, why are we even saying tool? I think Charlotte Sun will probably agree with me in any process, whether that is a manufacturing process or a computer based process, whether it is one of our, you know, we Indians love to escalate access to the point where we don’t need to.

49:16 - Leave the desk where a job is defined by being able to work from a desk.

49:20 - As opposed to going to the shop floor, but even in the shop for writing the same 3 rules apply, you know, even in the fabrication space and which is something I have a little bit of prior experience in there.

49:31 - Also the same thing, you know, if it’s hand versus brain or.

49:35 - If anything your doing is becoming your brain, you’re probably not being very efficient.

49:40 - There is probably a robotic way of getting it done, so I think it applies across far beyond Ms Office.

49:50 - Yeah. Yeah this just to add few points, I think, yeah, that’s that’s a valid point, but I will bring in a different perspective here.

49:59 - If you talk about IT industry now we all are moving towards the agile way of working right.

50:04 - We cannot afford to be inefficient now, right, at least as individuals for ourselves.

50:10 - We should not be inefficient and how you want to portray it like dockside and how you want to portray to your manager to your customer.

50:18 - That is left to us right? ‘cause there are so many other factors that are involved.

50:23 - You know in defining those, but we as individuals when we are responsible for certain tasks, at least there we have to be efficient and we don’t have a choice whether we have to be or where you do not have to be right.

50:37 - Even when it comes to my personal tasks, I don’t have a choice even even if there are external factors affecting me, I cannot be influenced by those factors.

50:48 - I should finish my work right? I should still use the effective way of finishing my work.

50:54 - But if you want to deliver it to your manager to the customer, that is where you know you can bring in all the factors.

51:00 - But for doing that activity I should not be inefficient.

51:03 - I should always be efficient, right? So that’s that’s one slide thing which you know I wanted to add because people should not get confused that you know.

51:12 - OK, even when I’m doing a task which I know which can happen in 10 minutes.

51:16 - Anyways, I know I’ve committed for one hour, so I’ll take the entire one that should not be the case.

51:21 - You still go ahead and finish it within that.

51:24 - Uh, 10 minutes. Make use of the remaining 45 or 50 minutes for other better work.

51:29 - Or you know you can utilize that time for yourself, especially in the you know in the arrow pandemic right where your time is, not your time anymore.

51:40 - Yeah no. I think there is one specific niche situation, where should it son? I disagree with you which is so I took the example of certain freelance gig economy or freelancer sites.

51:52 - So just take one of those examples, one which I’m most familiar with is there’s a site called Upwork and on up work you can either pick up fixed cost projects where somebody is going to pay you X for doing this, or you can pick up early projects.

52:09 - I consciously do not pick up early projects because up works system for Ali projects involves running one of their software on your computer, which then a takes a snapshot on your webcam every so many minutes.

52:21 - B takes snapshot of your desktop screen every so many minutes and see takes a snapshot of what applications are running on your computer every so many minutes.

52:30 - Which means if I were to very efficiently finish off something.

52:35 - In 15 minutes and it something which typically is built for two hours and then I sent in a bill for two hours of work itself.

52:42 - Will shoot down that building and build a client for one hour passed me that money and say that’s it.

52:47 - You’re trying to defraud the system. So in that case I really have to find an actual.

52:53 - Innovatively inefficient way of doing the job.

52:57 - OK, so there’s that one nice case and that is going to increase now as people move more and more towards the work from home.

53:03 - Come by and let’s face it, there are corporates who are doing something like that.

53:07 - There are corporates who have webcams running on their work from home employees, computers, watching them to track an Amazon is not the only such company.

53:14 - There are many other systems which are watching them to track whether they even leave their desk and go.

53:20 - Right, it’s probably far worse than it was in the workplace.

53:23 - In the workplace, you could go take a coffee break with five other people and gossip for 20 minutes and nobody would say a thing.

53:30 - Today that shows up in your timesheet. So I think there are there are going to be increasingly situations where you have to be creatively inefficient intentionally and innovatively inefficient.

53:42 - Yes, not everywhere. Not everyday. Nothing applies to everything but you know there is that specific niche which I think was a foreign concept by visible.

53:51 - I did. Within the last four minutes of event, let’s take one last quick question.

53:58 - Like you said that you need to be creatively intentionally for inefficiency to utilize that time.

54:05 - But how do you ensure that you don’t look inept? If you do that as this, I think someone’s raised their hand Fujita.

54:17 - Yes. You can hear me yes, yes, yeah. The thing is I openly share this idea with you guys to have a better understanding on my insides.

54:29 - So let’s say that you have talked to most of the products and the companies are well established.

54:36 - One for the examples you take up work and we went those kind of.

54:41 - So my question is, let’s say in within the company we are, we are grooming a some kind of kind of a Department.

54:49 - So at that level. There may be, there may be so many kind of standard ways to come up with the technological level, but in in for that moment we are we are grooming.

55:02 - We’re coming up, so we have to have to follow very basic things in that that model.

55:09 - Then we will lose some kind of some kind of main main best practices in the organization level.

55:16 - So how to tackle this gap? Because you all gave the solutions with.

55:22 - Up work Van will establish one is a beer coming from the download from zero 2 growing now.

55:28 - So at that level there may be some kind of gap with the technology and what we’re using here now because we we have to come to some stage and at this stage we can have all of the tools and that comes disgusting.

55:42 - So how to how to fill that gap with that efficiency? Actually Doctor you can.

55:49 - Yeah so. Um? I know what he’s saying and let me rephrase what is saying is saying most of the discussion we have had is either in two extremes, either an individual freelancer or a very large enterprise.

56:04 - What about small and medium businesses who may not have access to large scale consulting budgets or expertise in every level of technology and maybe not the training budget? How do we go about doing it now? Actually, at least as far as office is concerned, that kind of content is there everywhere.

56:22 - Free content, millions of videos, millions of tips and tricks, books, all that. But if you ask me authoritative content as to in a use case based manner in this case, what is the best without troubling you too much? It’s not a quick fix because typically what people do if there’s a problem, they Google it. Whatever comes on the first page first of first.

56:44 - Too many people don’t even understand the first is an ad.

56:48 - My Mail mine back but nobody has the patience to Scroll down.

56:51 - Because of that, the most commonly search method comes up, not necessarily the most optimal method.

56:58 - No, I don’t think there is a large scale solution for it, but Fortunately Fortunately for Trisha sleep, you asked it right now.

57:08 - And. I was always wanting to do something in this context because there are hundreds and thousands of resources for learning office tools and other tools as well, but real authoritative guidance which is not too big to digest.

57:24 - It should be short and sweet but not spoon feeding and using you to learn.

57:29 - So I actually I’ve just signed an agreement with Packt Publishing to write a book and the name of the book itself is Fortunately are inefficient and we have our own and traffic from Pact actually attending the session.

57:43 - So glad you asked that question. I can’t tell you the timeline yet, but. It will come soon.

57:50 - In any case that have been doing that on my blog and YouTube channel in any way.

57:55 - It’s not a tips and tricks blog. It forces you to think so.

57:59 - The only way to continue this journey at the right, individual or organizational level is to proactively learn.

58:06 - As a part of the game, it’s a mindset change, not how many features I know versus how many features you know.

58:12 - There’s no competition going on. It’s all music. Okie dokie thanks.

58:19 - Amiad based on my experience, what I’ve seen is.

58:25 - I think the process maturity is the major area that we need to address in, you know small and medium scale organizations because you know the processes are not so robust.

58:35 - Or it may be people dependent. So that is where that would be.

58:39 - The first step even before we could talk about efficiency.

58:43 - That’s just my observation which you know I want to put it across.

58:47 - Yeah, and just to add to what he said, whether it is a small organization or a large organization, when it comes to using office tools, there is no process defined anyway.

58:57 - It’s as bad, so don’t feel bad that you’re from a smaller country or larger country developed or developing economy.

59:04 - Small business, Medium, business, everyone is underdeveloped when it comes to office.

59:09 - Even Microsoft doesn’t have standard operating procedure for their staff for how to use office.

59:15 - When they created. I would say the same applies to any nontrivial suite of tools.

59:20 - Any feature rich product you mean. Yeah, any feature rich product or tool or tool set.

59:25 - In fact it is not like it’s a deficiency. People are not even notice that there is a need because everyone figures it out.

59:33 - Job is getting done and nobody’s checking how the job is done.

59:36 - And then in the process everyone is inefficient and they were happily inefficient thereafter like that.

59:44 - Unfortunately, now we’re out of time, so.

59:48 - Shall we conclude? I guess so unless some people from anyone has any questions or comments.

59:56 - The audience and participation. Thank you so much everyone for being.

60:03 - Anyone has any questions? Or any other observations to add to this discussion? Yeah, just unmute and talk or any comments about whether this session was useful.

60:14 - Could you have done something better? Anything any inputs, feedback is most welcome.

60:19 - So someone is also be sharing a feedback link as well, yes? Didn’t check.

60:26 - Press it, something good to hear all the comments.

60:30 - Thank you. Thank you babe. So hello and Adventure and Windows are amateur so.

60:40 - Of my, I was just hoping for a for the similar sessions which I have attended and I’ve gone through your all the tutorials as usual, but this session was entirely different and the fix and the subject which we discussed in this session was very very nice.

60:59 - And as as As for the all the previous sessions I got a different vision to look at.

61:06 - The other things so thanks a lot for all the panel members nipping Sir.

61:11 - Yeah, I’m just as well for coordinating, thanks.

61:16 - Thank you, thank you, thank you actually. Anyone else has anything to say? If not, can we just have a conclusions from the panelists? So just one new thing I’m trying nowadays because we’re in a call and we want to have good memory of this.

61:39 - Any of you want to show yours? Video and we can take a group photo whatever the teams allows.

61:48 - If anyone is. Wanting to do that, we can take a group photo and I’ll share the screenshot with you.

61:58 - Yeah, that is Def high def. Lock the.

62:18 - OK, I guess that’s it. Thanks epic. In the photo and let’s call it a day.

62:25 - Yeah. Great. Just want to close it formally.

62:34 - Yeah. Thank you everyone for joining us in this event.

62:38 - I think what we have concluded with is that as long as the company is not becoming efficient as a whole, it’s an individual’s choice. If we want to be efficient or not.

62:49 - Otherwise, the pandemic is really inefficiency, not covered. Thank you everyone to share your feedback in the link in the chat.

62:58 - And join us next time. Thank you, thank you. Yes, thank you thanks. Thanks everybody.

63:05 - Thank you. .