Behaviors that hamper productivity

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• Prioritize admin work over actual productive work
• Talk about improving things "in the future", without listing out specific POCs, timelines, etc.
• Treat everything as priority #1
• Answer every e-mail
• Defer decisions until you can "meet" to talk about the situation
• Don't move forward with a quick solution because you already have a similar solution "just around the corner"
  • "just around the corner" is usually much farther than you think
• Treat similar solutions as mutually exclusive
• Instead of addressing the root cause as to why certain work isn't getting done, start a competition with the possibility of a prize as "incentive" for people to work on something.
• Postpone important project work into the far future since "funding isn't available yet".
• When things are complex, treat them like their not and assume it'll just work out.
  • e.g. Trying to cram a years worth of project planning into a 1-hour meeting
• Plan like you have people which you don't have
• Don't train people on the soft skills
  • e.g. if you need a senior lead on a project, but don't have one, have a junior dev run it and just act like they're a senior (i.e. don't provide them with any mentorship/training/feedback).
• Move forward with work because you have funding, even though you don't have the developers to do the actual work.
• Move forward with projects using new technology without training anyone on the team in that technology
• Do all planning inside of a bubble (don't seek outside validation or consider other team's plans)
• When someone is complaining/asking for change, downplay that "pain" because you're not the one feeling it.
• Make sure those in charge of a product don't ever use that product
• Invite as many people as possible to every meeting possible
• Buy software based on a set of features that aren't important to their users, but sound important to you
• Think that you can't get everything done and therefore can't get anything done
  • Sometimes gridlock over choosing one item over another causes you to do neither, because you're too afraid of not doing one of the items. Instead, understand that your motivation with one item will wane and that you'll probably want something else to spice things up. Use all your ideas to help keep you motivated and doing something. You don't have to complete each project, and you certainly don't have to complete each project 100%. Much of your experience and knowledge gained will be in the first bits of working on something, and the mere fact that you didn't complete something doesn't mean it was wasted time.