With software eating the world, work today has been rapidly redefined. New tools have emerged that enable us to manage, communicate, build and maintain our work across teams and organizations. Each serving a particular function, there is (generally) utility in each and, together, they have come to define our workflows. But what happens when our productivity tools no longer make us productive?

Make no mistake, our tools can most certainly keep us busy, but busy doesn’t always translate to progress. Tickets and tasks, emails and issues, chats and meetings – managing our workflow is beginning to manage us. That is, we often find ourselves spending so much precious time, attention and effort staying up with the things that keep us connected and on track that we don’t always have time to focus on work that matters.

Low value – and often tedious – tasks can consume around two-thirds of your time.

Research has shown these low value – and often tedious – tasks can consume around two-thirds of your time as a knowledge worker. These same tasks, however, tend to be easily off-loaded or delegated freeing up more hours in the day.

More hours in the day. What everyone wants, but can’t get. Or can we?

More Hours in the Day

While it’s unfortunately impossible to add more hours to the day, you can create more time for both you and your team. Relieving yourselves of certain tasks and focusing on higher-value work can boost productivity, not to mention personal satisfaction. Let’s face it – nobody likes the drudgery of administrative bureaucracy and nobody wants to live inside a Gannt chart, Kanban, task list, inbox, or otherwise. Knowledge workers and experts are simply too valuable to misuse their efforts on jobs that can be easily handled elsewhere.

Knowledge workers and experts are simply too valuable to misuse their efforts on jobs that can be easily handled elsewhere.

Sounds great, but what about all the other work? Of course, it needs done, too. Our teams and projects need to stay on track and organized after all.

Scalable Efficiency

In order to achieve this notion of scalable efficiency we have observed organizations looking to unburden their knowledge-based employees by increasing administrative support, out-sourcing and hyperspecializing their workforces. While each of these do benefit productivity – and you must applaud these firms for recognizing the problem – they are hardly scalable solutions. (In fact, they are great examples of doing things that don’t scale, whether intentional or not.)

Wouldn’t it be great if your low-value work just did itself? We at Oz sure think so.

So what are we to do? How can we redesign our workflows to actually make us more productive in an achievable manner? Wouldn’t it be great if your low-value work just did itself? We at sure think so.

Intelligent Support

We believe the answer lies in intelligence. Intelligence that makes the easy work invisible and the tedious work easy. Intelligence that is both achievable and scalable. Intelligence that is machine driven, but human centered. As noted earlier, with software eating the world, vast amounts of data are generated by our teams each day. We have designed Oz to take advantage of this and use your workflows as platforms to make your tools work for you, not the other way around.

We’ve all heard the sentiment “work smarter, not harder.” With Oz, we believe you should work hard, but only the things that matter.