The Amazing Potential to Increase Productivity and Have More Fun at Work: Pair Working
You can call me a productivity freak, as I have over the last 10 years experimented with hundreds of ways to increase my productivity. The one way that had the highest impact on productivity was definitely Pair Working. Here I explain how you can enjoy the benefits of working with a pair.
1. Pair Programming
Pair working was introduced to me by pair programming, which is a core concept of the agile methodology of extreme programming (XP) that recommends. Pair programming means that while one person codes, a second person sits next to him and gives advice on what to code and vice-versa.
Around ten years ago I was building a new development team and I was experimenting with agile methodologies like pair programming. So I told my team to try pair working. At the time I was feeling unsure about it because I was afraid that I was using two developers to do the job of one developer. However, after a short period of time it became apparent that pair programming really worked. The code quality was high, the progress was fast and the developers were motivated.
2. Which Kind of Tasks Can Be Done in Pairs?
After seeing the great success of pair programming I was wondering if it was possible to apply the concept of pair programming to other kinds of work. For example, was it possible to have the same increase in productivity of pair working on tasks related to marketing, finance or accounting? And if it was possible, would the benefits be as significant as for software development?
I put it to the test and soon discovered that almost any other task, done on the computer, can be done in pairs!
3. Pair Working and Delegation
At the time that I was thinking about applying pair programming to other areas, I had just hired an assistant. My challenge now was to delegate as many of my tasks as possible to my assistant. However, I found that for many of those tasks my knowledge was required; so I had a hard time letting my assistant take tasks from me. But then it occurred to me that instead of either doing the tasks myself or delegating those tasks to my assistant 100%, I could take a middle way: I could work in pairs with my assistant.
This proved extremely successful. While my assistant wasn’t able to do most of my tasks by herself, she was able to work together with me, sharing the computer screen and either executing what I was telling her or giving me her opinion on the work that I was doing. At the same time she was learning the things that I was working on and thereby enabling me to later fully delegate those tasks to her.
By first pair working with my assistant and only afterwards delegating to her, I was able to become more productive and work on fewer tasks.
When I started out I was doing most of the non technical tasks by myself, as shown here:
Now the work distribution looks different:
● ⅓ of my tasks I am able to delegate,
● ⅓ I am pair working, and
● another ⅓ I am working on myself, as shown here:
Now, for every new task I will first do it myself. Then I will work in pairs. And only then will I delegate the tasks. We can show this order as follows:
4. Pair Working in Practice
How does pair working look in practice? Let me give you an example from my own work: I might have to work on an article for which most of the content is already in my head. I would therefore often dictate the content to my assistant and at the same time I would be seeing her screen and checking the content and improving it. Alternatively, I would write the content myself and let her check on my spelling, grammar and style.
For all of the above benefits, working in pairs makes perfect sense and if you’re not doing it already, you should try to do it as soon as possible.
If you are interested in having your own partner to work with you, get in touch with Focus Cycles. Focus Cycles provides you with highly-skilled, intelligent work partners for as low as 10 USD per hour:
5. Benefits of Pair Working
There are multitude of benefits of pair working, the most important of them are:
● Best way to delegate
● More fun
● Higher quality of work
● Hourly rate difference
● Less distraction
5.1. Best way to delegate
When you are trying to delegate you often have the problem that the tasks that you are delegating require your knowledge. Therefore, before you can delegate, you need to transfer that knowledge to the person to take on those tasks. The best way to do this is by pair working with that person.
5.2. More fun
Working alone, especially when working from home can often be lonely. Pair working has the benefit that you have constant social interaction.
5.3. Higher quality of work
When you are pair working you are able to check upon each other’s work quality, thereby ensuring that you don’t make mistakes. For pair programming it has been documented that code developed by two developers pair working is higher quality and it has much less bugs.
5.4. Hourly rate difference
You can save a lot of money by hiring a work partner at a lower rate than yours.
Let’s say your hourly rate is 90 EUR and your assistant’s rate is 9 EUR. So if your work partner helps you to be twice as productive, they will generate you an additional 90 EUR every hour, while you will only spend 9 EUR.
5.5. Less distraction
Many people, especially those working remotely struggle with the many distractions that they are exposed to, especially via social media, as they are only a click away from the latest news on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
Working in pairs makes these distractions much less likely. Why? Because someone else is always looking at your screen, so you won’t be distracted by social media or messaging.
For all of the above benefits, working in pairs makes perfect sense and if you’re not doing it already, you should try to do it as soon as possible.
If you are interested in having your own partner to work with you, get in touch with Focus Cycles. Focus Cycles provides you with highly-skilled, intelligent work partners for as low as 10 USD per hour:
Focus Cycles is a productivity consulting company offering online productivity courses, productivity software and productivity coaching. As you are reading this, we let you register a trial of pair working at a big discount! In order to do so, you have to register at www.focuscycles.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.
