Renaldi Adrian

Have you ever caught yourself busy, but not productive? Or sometimes simply idle? As a staff, it’s easy to shrug it off because you can think like “I’m idle because my manager hasn’t given me any tasks.”

But when you’re the manager, idle time feels different. There’s a pressure to “keep the factory running”, and that pressure may lead to filling the silence with just any work, which may result in Yang Penting Kerja instead of Kerjain yang Penting. (Only working for the sake of work, not doing the important work).

But what does kerjain yang penting really mean? Is it about launching a big project? Executing the dramatic change? It’s easy to get sidetracked when everyone defines “important” differently. The good news is, there’s a way to define kerjain yang penting more definitively, so we stay focused, avoid distractions, and make sure our work truly aligns with the organization’s goals.

Remember: in an organization, cost reduction is not the final goal, the number of features delivered each quarter is not the goal either, the real goal is profit. That may sound obvious, but sometimes even the most important things hide right under our nose. So the real question is: how do we break down “profit” into smaller, actionable steps?

Profit in an organization comes from three key factors: Throughput, Inventory, and Operational Expense.

• Throughput: is the rate at which the system generates money through sales
• Inventory: Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell.
• Operational Expense: Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput

(From The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt)

So when you’re a manager and you find yourself in idle moments, resist the urge to create busywork that doesn’t contribute to the real goals: throughput, inventory, or operational expense. Instead, use that time to identify tasks that directly impact one of these three areas.

Let me share my case as a Lead Developer:

• Throughput: I focus on how our digital products (website and apps) can generate revenue faster. For example, I researched how to shorten the subscription and purchase journey, reducing touchpoints without confusing potential customers. Lesser touch points mean lesser frictions.
• Inventory: Unreleased features take effort to maintain. Without proper management, they can get lost in messy version control or be forgotten (this really happens). To prevent this, I documented every project with backgrounds, objectives, technical requirements, and success metrics. This way, our “feature inventory” stays organized and reduces the risk of errors during deployment or while managing work in progress (WIP).
• Operational Expense: Since I have access to our cloud services, I analyzed server usage trends and optimized resources. By scaling smartly, we reduced costs without compromising performance, because….I’m not on Machine Learning or AI organization, why would I need a super computer?

So here’s the takeaway: before we, as managers, assign tasks to our team, we should think of The Goal first: throughput, inventory, and operational expense. With this into consideration, it becomes easier to filter out which tasks are just “noise” and which ones directly contribute to the real objective. Unless you’re running a very mature organization.…but there’s always room to improve, isn’t there?