Becoming lean, removing sentimental rocks
I helped a recently retired friend move down to Arizona last weekend. If I can indulge a manufacturing metaphor to describe the scene, his "production life-cycle" was finally over. We filled his U-haul with all his accumulated possessions - including some very strange, clunky, and unpack-able items I would call "sentimental rocks". They were pretty, but they ended up stifling our plans to get him moved in one weekend.
After participating in that adventure, I thought about the other sentimental rocks we all are susceptible of accumulating in life and work. These sentimental rocks, are "priceless" yet have an actual replacement value of almost zero dollars -and absolutely inhibit our progress.
We must identify these sentimental rocks at every stage of life and work -and remove them. The following is a list of 4 types of sentimental rocks that we must endeavor to eliminate.
Old clunky share folders
We tend to like the old style windows folders with their familiar look and feel but they are absolute productivity killers when it comes to any kind of shared work or review -on the order of 10X touches. Solution: eliminate shared company folders and find a good workflow tool or share-point server.
Procedures that collect dust
Procedures that collect dust through under-use or that do not identify clearly "who" does "what" "when", or that have morphed into a patchwork of disconnected sub-processes are also productivity killers. The resulting confusion and misinterpretation in many cases are worse than if there were no procedure to begin with. Solution: Do a full re-write, preserving and consolidating the verbs into a lean and effective document that is vetted, and effectively trained to.
Unconscious habit - and it's twin tribal knowledge
Ryan Holiday said, "Never do anything out of habit." Good habits may sometimes serve a constructive purpose but they can also be a tremendous impediment to change. Quoting from Holiday's book:
We are studying philosophy precisely to break ourselves of rote behavior ...Ask yourself: Is this really the best way to do it? Know why you do what you do -do it for the right reasons.
A good question to ask ourselves is "why do we do things the way we do?" If the answer is, because we always have, then perhaps it's a time for an intentional and directed change.
And lastly, and most importantly...
Remove small distractions from life
More than ever before, the waste that enters into our processes, come from the trivial many small distractions incident to modern life. Taken over time, these small forms of waste, robot emails, and other "click-bait" tend to suck life energy away from critically important objectives. Solution: Start each day with 2 or 3 objectives, Practice time blocking, and saying no. Doing this will have the biggest positive impact on our life's work.
Great suggestions Joel. Smart phones? Electronic devices disrupting sleep? How about social media? Or allowing interruptions (that can almost always wait) during productive work time? All time killers, focus and productivity disrupters if not managed properly. I appreciated a recent book you recommended-- Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. One short vignette from the book: The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer recognized the impact of trivial distractions on Deep Work. He refused to get caught up in the meaningless back and forth of many Twitter conversations and wrote an article on why he did not Tweet. "Twitter is Crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I am morally superior to it, but because I don't think I could handle it. I'm afraid I'd end up letting my son go hungry." I thought the last sentence was deep. It could refer to Facebook or other social media. It could refer to checking every email that comes in or every phone call. It could refer to hours stolen from writing that important best seller (Which George Packer did, shortly after writing his anti-Tweeting article. The book was "The Unwinding," which won the National Book Award.) It could refer to hours stolen from work that need to be made up by stealing them from family members or other important relationships. It could be time stolen from pondering deep challenges and discovering profound solutions. Your article on removing sentimental rocks was thought provoking. I loved it. Keep them coming!
I believe in the magic of celebrating life milestones, be they business or personal. My company Boxilocks does just that~ creating deeply personal printed boxes and contents that share your celebration story.
8 年good article Joel, thank you!
Leader, Thinker, Innovator, Culture-maker, Problem-solver, Poet
8 年But the agent of change--especially when that agent either purports or pretends to be our surrogate in bringing about the change we hope to make--matters as much as the change itself. Otherwise, we might trade melons for lemons. And you know what I'm talking about. :)
Quality Manager / Engineer
8 年Outstanding article, Joel. As difficult as it can be, it becomes necessary. You will undoubtedly hear some say, "We have always done it this way.".