“A bad system will beat a good person every time. “
~W. Edwards Deming
Like a drive through at McDonalds, you need to create a system for your work that is consistent and can be applied over and over again for the same results.
In the previous section you already managed to identify and streamline your work structure. Use this section to streamline it further so that you can go through all the steps that don’t require a great deal of brain power in as little time as it takes to make toast.
Going back to the case study, John found that he spent a lot of time focusing on the details of each manual. He would constantly make sure that each figure was exactly the same distance from the header and body text and that each figure was exactly the same size. His meticulous attention to detail was great, however it was slowing him down tremendously and he was beginning to fall behind.
After awhile, he began to notice the small but consistent things that he would do that would slow him down while working. You’d be surprised by how much time people waste simply scrolling up and down a few pages. He found that he was always looking for text, and headers that he had previously written on different pages. He was also spending a lot of time scaling and cropping individual images on each page, making sure they were just right.
While it might only take 2-3 minutes to scale, crop and position an image properly on a page, multiply this by 60 images and you have 3 hours of wasted time on something that when streamlined, took no more than 20 seconds per image.
Scrolling up and down looking for used text and headers could take anywhere between 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This added to the constant scrolling up and down pages made it difficult to refocus on the task at hand as soon as the text and headers had been put in place.
Below is a table showing examples of how simple tasks can be streamlined in order to create vast time savings when done collectively.
Ideally as mentioned before, you would like to eliminate as many steps as possible from a process. When elimination is no longer an option, the rest of the steps should be streamlined in such a way that you can speed through them with as little thought as possible.
The fewer steps there are and the less you need to think about a process, the faster you will be able to complete something.
Important Points
- Reduce the number of work steps to increase work speed
- Streamline tasks that are carried out repeatedly during work so they can be carried out as quickly as possible
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Related posts:
- Exercise 1.8: Creating plans to deal with persistent problems
- Exercise 1.4: Eliminating all unnecessary tasks
- Exercise 1.2: Isolating your most important work activities
- Exercise 1.1: Overviewing your current working process
- Exercise 1.3: Improving the teleworking compatibility of work related activities
Yasuo Long believes that all employees should have the right to design their lifestyle according to their needs in order to maintain their health, their relationships and their happiness. In pursuit of this, he quit the 9-to-5 and became a telecommuter to give himself the time and mental freedom to discover what it really means to live with direction and purpose.
