that is the indispensable metric used by Mark Cuban that he shared in his Chase Javis interview (https://youtu.be/wasB2TjqqNg) around the 30 days of genius series.
In my IT work, my goal is to always outdo myself out of a job. To automate as much as possible. Computers don’t make mistakes, programmers do, people who feed the wrong input information do, but computers don’t.
I have failed this metric on at least two recent projects. Things just didn’t go smoothly for a few reasons. The primary one I think is I didn’t clearly communicate the vision and the new path. Instead I swooped in, ran at 100km/hr dropped some basic documentation in the staff members lap and said “go forth run”, when they hadn’t worked out walking yet, let alone running.
This makes me feel terrible when I do this, I have not made the world better, I’ve made someone’s life harder! The exact opposite of what I was trying to achieve.
Why am I trying to outdo myself out of a job? Because if I can automate it, I can focus on creating something new, solving a new problem, learning something different. If im stuck doing the same repetitive task, that is just no fun at all.