How do we deal with procrastination ?

In Intelligrape we follow, following practices which work for us to overcome our human procrastinating nature.

1). Project Tracker – Our every project has its own Trac logging. Trac is a web tool to manage your project.

2). Slicing work over tickets, Prioritizing it and having Daily ticket targets – If we take big functionality as a whole it seems to be very big task, so we cut it into small pieces of step by step work named as tickets and put it into our trac login. Everybody has their own set of assigned tickets to work upon which is set on priority basis like ‘Blocker, critical, major, minor and trivial’. Our daily focus is to not have any blocker and critical tickets pending.

3). Stand up meetings – We do daily or weekly stand up meetings, which help our teams to set their targets for the day or week and to get their status of completed and pending work. Why is the meeting done while standing? Because, it will create an urgency to finish it in minimum possible time and should not stretch into lengthy discussions.

4). Run-time updates / Zero reporting – We share google docs, trac login, screenshare with our clients. So whatever work we do, the updates are run time. We don’t waste time in sending fancy reports. Even our clients also assign work by simply creating tickets instead of sending length mails.

5). Learning & Sharing –We always keep an eye on new emerging technologies which will work for us and make our work easier and less time taking. Plus every project give us some insights which we share through sending techy mails to all of us. We provide study materials, arrange internal sessions & workshops, encourage blog writing, mailinglist replies to share our experience and learnings & improve our skill sets as a routine exercise. So that next time, same work we complete in lesser time with more expert way.

6). 3-6 months individual goals – We encourage everyone to get out of their comfort zone and set some individual goals. It can be technical, operational or interest level. Like learning any new technology or functionality, taking project ownership, taking more responsibilities, developing reading habit, writing blogs, articles, even books, releasing plulgins, giving presentation in seminars, organizing events etc. In other words we are dragging ourselves from monotonous work and giving ourselves new challenges and making the job more exciting.

7). Internal feedback, Recognition & motivation – To put a check on whether we are moving in the right track, we take frequent feedbacks from clients, teammates and peers. We have internal online surveys, quarterly 1-2-1 sessions. To keep oneself charged up every month, we give company level recognition to individuals for their extra efforts and exemplary work. Recognition in written as well as monetary terms. Promoting team efforts to encourage healthy competition. Instead of reporting, we promote mentoring and team spirit.
By following all these practices at the end of the day we all have most of the answers of above asked questions.