Preserving Production Capability aka Holidays

September 26th, 2010

If you’ve ever read the hugely popular book 7 Habits of Highly effective people by Stephen Covey you might remember his comments on preserving production capacity.  Covey cites the old fable of the goose and the golden egg where the farmer kills his gold egg laying bird to get all the eggs at once only to find there are none and his bird is dead.  This concept of  balancing your productivity level with working to preserve/increase your production capacity is so crucial yet is often forgotten in our workaholic society.  You just can’t work the machine so hard and delay maintenance or the engine will burn out.

I’m not so good at taking breaks and preserving my production capacity so I decided I had to schedule in some vacation to make sure it happened.  It rolled around way faster than I expected and I felt that it was a really inopportune time to be leaving work but I went on holiday for two weeks as far away from hair, salons and computers as possible hiking in the Canadian Rockies.  It was incredible to be able to step back from things and really get some perspective.  I find I get so much great thinking done on trips like this and they more than pay off in the long run. Now that I’m back I’m totally motivated to rock things.

Thanks to our awesome team for letting me escape for a a bit.

It really doesn’t pay to just keep trudging along when you’re tired and burned out.  You’ll get less work done and to make things worse you’ll do a poor job of it.  Make sure everyone in your company gets the time off they need to stay effective.

stephen
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