What am I doing? Why am I doing it?
What’s your personal Capacity like? How much can you do in a day? Think about when you’re super energised and focused, free of constraints or curve balls. It feels a little gamified, you’re tearing up your to-do list, setting fire to the keyboard and, as I believe it’s referred to, totally slaying. What’s your limit? When do you reach maximum capacity?
Capacity relates to how much we can do, our volume of activity relative to time, resources and bandwidth.
But does our high Capacity equate to being effective?
When we are obliterating our to-do list, we are concentrating on WHAT we are doing. What if we direct our attention to WHY we are doing it? Moving the focus from Capacity to Value.
Value relates to the impact of what we do, its significance or usefulness.
Capacity and Value are inextricably linked.
How often do you see your to-do list shrink? What happens when you tick one item off? Simply by being efficient, we don’t automatically get less to do. In fact, we are often required to do more. So, if our required capacity must keep escalating, what happens when we reach our perceived maximum? We can’t simply add more time, more resource, more bandwidth.
Prioritising value might mean changing what we pay attention to, and how we approach work. Value-driven activity simplifies processes, looks for efficiencies, and eliminates tasks.
You can be busy (high capacity) but still deliver low impact (low value)
You can do less (low capacity) but create huge outcomes (high value)
A great analogy is the expedition rucksack. High capacity means carrying a bigger pack, High value means only packing what’s actually useful.
So, if you and your team feel overwhelmed, ask: “Do we have a capacity problem, or a value problem?” – You may discover that you spend precious time doing too much low-value work.
Imagine if, at the end of year team review, your leader is asking: “How can we do more?” Perhaps the questions should be: “What are we paying attention to, why are we doing it, and does it matter?”
You might find the image below helpful when thinking about this further:
