Jim Womack, founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute and the man responsible for putting Lean on the map (at least in this country), recently wrote an article about what he calls “cadence.” This concept ties in nicely to what I preach about how to “live in your calendar” rather than your inbox, and why a to-do list just isn’t a powerful enough tool to enable you to manage your work.
Please be patient with the lengthy quote that follows. I think it’s acutely relevant in a world in which your boss or colleague often drops stuff on your desk at 4pm and expects you to finish it by 9am the next morning – even though it’s been sitting on her desk for a week and a half.
I hope that every Lean Thinker by now understands takt time. This is the available production time per day divided by the number of items the customer is demanding each day. For example, if the single-shift production process operates eight hours a day (480 minutes) and customers demand 240 widgets a day, the takt time is two minutes. . . .
You're not the only one who struggles with time management.
The Wall Street Journal's Theory & Practice column last week highlighted several executives who didn't quite live up to their resolutions to better manage time in 2007.
Mike Durney, the CFO of Dice Holdings, wanted to handle work related to the company's London office in the morning so that staff over there didn't have to work into the evenings. Unfortunately, morning meetings sometimes got in the way, forcing him to call or email London later. His new approach for 2008? Schedule his work: setting aside blocks of time for email and investor calls. He also vows to turn off his email alerts so that he doesn't get pulled into email when he's not supposed to.
Nortel Networks CEO Mike Zafirovski failed to start and finish internal meetings on time. He blames "aggressive agendas" and a relatively new management team, and wants to do better in 2008. He thinks he did better with his resolution to keep his inbox down to a maximum of 99 unanswered messages.
From Rick Tehrani, president and publisher of TMCNet, comes this gem about the productivity-enhancing potential of visual voicemail:
. . . the ability to be talking with a caller and receive voicemail messages as text while still talking is an amazing productivity booster. A busy executive can be on the phone while forwarding voicemail messages as action items via e-mail. Others in an organization can respond to these voicemails while the executive continues speaking.
Now, don't get me wrong: I think that, like many new technologies, there's a time and place for visual voicemail. Hell, if nothing else, not squandering the salad days of your life listening to the dreaded,
For more message options, press 0. To continue wasting minutes on your calling plan, press 6. To be put on hold indefinitely, press *8
is worth the price of visual voice mail alone.
Whew! Just in case you panicked at the thought of not having access to email on your upcoming five hour flight to Slippery Rock, JetBlue has come to the rescue with in-flight internet access. You'll never again have to endure three whole unconnected hours without riveting messages from the CEO informing you that his daughter's Girl Scout cookies are on sale in his office.
Tim Walker, over at the Business Insight Zone, just blogged about Will Smith and his astonishing work ethic. Tim cites a quote from Smith in a 60 Minutes interview:
“I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. I’ve viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy’s sleeping? I’m working. While the other guy’s eatin’? I’m working. While the other guy’s making love, I mean, I’m making love, too. But I’m working really hard at it,” he tells Kroft, laughing.
As far as I know, Will Smith doesn't know anything about lean. However, he clearly understands the notion of continuous improvement. Perhaps even more importantly, he demonstrates a disciplined approach towards making that improvement. Tim puts it nicely when he writes that
There's a scene in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, in which two characters are talking in a bar. One of them describes how his business went bankrupt. He explains, "Gradually, then suddenly." This is precisely how your office went from a paragon of organization following your last cleaning binge to its current state of post-tornado trailer park.
It started gradually. You ran from the 9:00am meeting to the 10:00am conference call, while dropping your notes and a few handouts from the first meeting onto your desk. You did it again after the next one. And the next. Rinse and repeat. You told yourself that you'd get to all that stuff later. . . but, of course, you never did: when you finally got back to your office, you just shoved it to the back corner of your desk and dove into your email. And then suddenly you looked up, and you had piles of papers, post-it notes, Powerpoint decks, scribbled cocktail napkins and soy sauce packets lying everywhere. Like Hemingway said: gradually, then suddenly.
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal article, Email's Friendly Fire (available for free here), shows just how wide is the gulf between lean thinking and conventional thinking.
First, the sobering (frightening?) data: last year, the average corporate email user received 126 messages a day, a 55% increase from 2003. Translating that number into your most valuable commodity -- time -- workers are now spending 26% of their day managing email, a number expected to hit 41% by 2009. (All figures from the Radicati Group.) And while your mileage may vary, you're probably not too far off these numbers.
The problem isn't really spam, either:
This is the final part of a three-part series on the myths that underlie our thinking in the workplace and that lead to waste and inefficiency.
Myth #3: "I'm in the service business. I *have to* respond immediately."
This is probably the most powerful -- and most pernicious -- myth you labor under. It destroys efficiency, vaporizes productivity, and foments more stress and dissatisfaction than any other.
Am I being hyperbolic? Yes, most definitely. But this myth deserves it.
Clients complain all the time that they feel reactive, rather than proactive. That they're always putting out fires. That they spent 12 hours at the office and despite being too busy for lunch, that they "didn't get anything done." That they're buried in email. That they're always interrupted. And when I ask them why they didn't get to their strategic priorities, they explain patiently (as though to a child) that they're in the service business, and as a result, they have to respond immediately -- by answering the phone, sending an email, keeping their door open, etc.
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the myths that underlie our thinking in the workplace and that lead to waste and inefficiency.
Myth #2: "I'll just take care of the easy things first, and then tackle the big project."
Like all good fantasies, this one has the veneer of logic, which makes it so very attractive. It sure seems to make sense, right? Write a couple of emails first, before getting bogged down in building that spreadsheet you've been dreading. Or make a few phone calls, and then dig into the expense reports from the last three months.
You figure that it makes sense to cross a bunch of easy things off your to-do list, because the big, icky, nasty thing -- the one that everytime you look at it (and lord knows you've looked at it plenty of times during the two months it's been sitting on your desk) makes you feel like you suck because you can't seem to get it done -- will take a long time to finish. And frankly, you might be right about how long it will take, or how difficult it will be.
But you're wrong in putting that task behind the easy ones. Here's why:
One of the key tools of lean methodology is root-cause analysis. In contrast to workplace solutions that simply treat the symptoms of a problem, root-cause analysis is used to identify the true problem that lies beneath the symptoms.
There are three myths that underlie much of the inefficiency, chaos, and waste in most workplaces. Over the next three weeks, I'll address each of these. My guess is that when you see deadlines being missed, people working overtime, things falling between the cracks, and excessive FedEx bills, you can be sure that one or more of these myths are at the root. Here's the first.
Myth #1: I'll get to it later.
Um, how should I say this clearly? No, you won't. Later never comes. Between now and "later," you'll have 6 brain-deadening meetings, 114 urgent emails, 15 interruptions from coworkers needing your help for "just a second," and two birthday celebrations in the break room.
"I do like to read a book while having sex. And talk on the phone. You can get so much done. " (actress Jennifer Connelly, 2005)
The above quote probably isn’t quite what bloggers such as Matt Cornell, Tim Walker, Tim Morgan, Merlin Mann, and others had in mind when they inveighed against multitasking. But seldom has any statement made the folly of multitasking so creepily apparent.
In the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Walter Kirn wrote an elegant attack on multitasking (The Autumn of the Multitaskers, available here.) that covers a lot of ground, and quite eloquently. In response to those who mistakenly believe that multitasking helps us get more stuff done, he writes
Stop using email. (All the time.)
Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about companies that have enforced an email-free day each week. (You can read the article for free here.) As you can imagine, many people in these companies were apoplectic when they heard about the email ban, considering it "a needless obstacle" to getting their work done. And, of course, the simple shock of being separated from their Blackberries and other email tools was not too different from being thrown into a detox clinic.
But here's the interesting thing: most of the people who initially resisted the ban came to support it. The director of product management for U.S. Cellular gradually realized that reading and responding to all the email she was sending was probably a burden to her co-workers. And others in the article comment that human interaction is not only important in business, but actually faciliates it.
It’s not just arteries that get sclerotic. Your calendar can, too.
You know you’re suffering from sclerosis of the calendar when your day is packed so full with meetings that you don’t have time to do any of the work that those meetings generate. But how much of the time you’re irretrievably sinking into the conference room is actually valuable? Probably not as much as you’d like. And while listening to yet another gripping report on market share gains in the all-important organic cereal market for 6-12 year olds is nice and all, it's probably not as much fun as watching 30 Rock from your couch.
It’s surely not a newsflash when I tell you that there’s a lot of muda in meetings. So here are three ways to avoid the giant sucking sound that means your precious time is getting Hoovered up by well-meaning colleagues and their meetings.
Congratulations: after six, seven, or even more years of keeping your nose to the grindstone for 1900+ hours per year, you've made partner. Now you get the posh office, the long lunches, and the Thursday golf games. Oh, wait. It's not the 1960s anymore. Still, you get to share in the firm's profits, and that's not bad.
Except that, in the words of Marshall Goldsmith, what got you here won't get you there.
As an associate, you were rewarded for increasing your billable hours. But that's not the game for you anymore. That's not how you're going to be successful as a partner. You're not going to increase your book of business from $2 million to $22 million by spending a few more Saturdays on the Johnson IPO and misssing all your kid's soccer games.
You need to cut down your billable hours and increase the time you spend on business development. And the only way to do that is to begin delegating your work -- early, often, and effectively.
There's big business in stressballs these days. You can hardly go to an office without seeing a few gathering dust on people's desks. The dust, of course, is an indication that they don't work. (Unless your goal is to develop kung-fu grip and have a really commanding handshake.)
But here's the secret: your job isn't stressful.
Don't get me wrong - your job is very likely demanding and difficult. However, the stress generally isn't inherent in the work you do. Rather, it's your reaction to the demands of the work. And if you're stressed, it's because you either lack the knowledge or the systems to deal with those demands. (However, if you're in one of those jobs where your company's very existence hinges on every decision you make (Aeron chair or Mirra chair?) feel free to skip this and go back to work.)
You would not have wanted to be on I-95 in Pennsylvania last week.
Driving down that highway in a rental car on my last business trip, fiddling with the windows, adjusting the air conditioning, and trying to pre-set NPR on the radio, I couldn’t keep a constant speed. I was all over the dish, from 50 mph to 75 mph. Oh, and for good measure I started driving like your grandfather, with the left turn signal on for a couple of miles.
Now, driving at a constant speed on a freeway isn’t really all that tough. Most of us mastered that skill three or four years before getting our drivers license. And yet, I couldn’t do it. In my own car, no problem. But in the rental car, with an unfamiliar dashboard layout – no way. I couldn’t concentrate on my primary task – piloting the car at a constant speed – because I had to allocate mental resources towards finding my way around the buttons on the dashboard.
So what does this have to do with you, your office, and 5S?
At least, not at the airport.
My blogging will be a bit scarce for the next few weeks, as I'm on a long business/personal trip in Istanbul, Greece, Cambridge, and. . . Newark, Delaware.
Arriving at Istanbul's Atataturk airport yesterday, however, I was struck by the inefficiency of the visa system. Visas are sold at a different location than passport control. So after leaving the plane, visitors walk to one location, stand on line, purchase a visa, and then walk to another location, and stand on line for passport control and immigration.
To top it off, there's no clear sign that you have to wait on two different lines, so about half the passengers had to leave the passport line after about 5 minutes in order to join the crowd at the visa window.
Why not sell visas on the same line as passport control? Or at the very least, why not have a clear sign telling people to first go here, and then go here? Put color-coded lines on the floor. Something, anything to avoid the waste of time and confusion for sleep-deprived passengers arriving in the country.
Not that I'm grumpy or anything....
In their seminal book Lean Thinking, Jim Womack and Daniel Jones state, “things work better when you focus on the product and its needs, rather than the organization or the equipment.” This is a simple and deceptively powerful concept. Even people who aren’t directly involved in providing a product or service to a consumer have a customer somewhere in the organization.
All too often, we focus on the equipment (ourselves): our schedules, our to-do lists, our responsibilities. But what does the world look like when viewed from the perspective of our work rather than our role as a worker?
One of the basic tenets of lean philosophy is the pursuit of perfection: after improving one's own performance, or the efficiency of the system (or both), you need to go back and do it again. And again. And again. Not that you'll ever reach perfection (no inventory, no waste), but striving for that ideal forces continuous improvement.
In a manufacturing setting, it's easy to measure improvement: cycle time, inventory levels, time required to exchange dies, number of defects, on-time shipments, etc. But how do you measure improvement in an office environment? How do you quantify the improvement in your own work habits and situation? Here are a few ideas:
Your cellphone, Blackberry, and general willingness to work late and on weekends are part of the problem, not the solution. You need to reduce the inventory of time, not increase it.
