Alan Weiss, author of Million Dollar Consulting, advises consultants to drop the bottom 10% of their work every year. That way you have to force yourself to grow and offer new (frequently more lucrative) offerings. The same advice applies to managers.
When I teach management, I explain that managers have three responsibilities:
- To deliver results
- To develop their people (so that the manager and the group can continue to deliver results)
- Improve capacity of their organizations
Yes, it's true that developing new capacity may feel close to impossible. But it's just the barrier to entry of being a great manager. Great managers develop their people (winning their trust, building a team). And, great managers realize that when they develop people, they can improve the capacity of their organizations.
That capacity improvement is what allows you (and your group) to drop the bottom 10% of your work. Here's an example of how I do this as part of my goals for projects. When I work with a project team that doesn't have a lot of automated testing, I analyze the product and see where automated testing would help. Then I work with the project team to introduce the idea of automated smoke tests or regression tests for that part of the project. We make the tests project goals, not project requirements. We timebox and see how much progress we make. Then we replan, making sure we accomplish the project requirements, not just the goals.
What would you have to do to drop the bottom 10% of your work?
Dropping things seems to be a business trend. You cite Alan Weiss recommending consultants drop the bottom 10% of their sales.
Some large corporations have taken to dropping the bottom 10% of their work force annually — fresh blood and all that. (Personally I refuse to buy into these quotas; do the self inspection at least annually and dismiss as much, or as little, staff as you need to in order to reinvigorate your business.)
Joel Spolssky is advocating not doing things: “In fact when I thought about this later, I realized that for a long time, I had been doing dumb shit (that’s a technical term) simply because I figured that eventually it would have to get done, so I might as well do it now.” (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SetYourPriorities.html)
And here you are also suggest dropping the bottom 10% of your tasks. But your example doesn’t drop them — i.e. let them go undone, rather you are recommending automating them, and in fact expending extra energy in order to gain that automation. You’ve got a net improvement in efficiency but you haven’t “dropped” anything that I can see.