TimeBack Management - A Better Way To Work

I've met the enemy. And it's me.

dan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:37:33 -0800

t's embarrassing, really.

I spend a good deal of my time and energy inveighing against waste in individual work habits -- I mean, I get paid to teach people how to spot that type of waste, identify root causes, and put countermeasures in place so they can get back to creating customer value. So you can imagine how red-faced I was when I turned the A3 on my own work habits and found enough fat to make me a poster child for American obesity.

I started an A3 because I haven't been making as much progress as I want on the book I'm writing. I've always been very disciplined about my work, particularly during previous careers when I worked in other companies. But working at home has somehow undermined that focus and discipline. Between household chores and work responsibilities, I just don't seem to have enough time to write. I figured that an A3 might help me identify the root cause of the waste.

The calendar as kanban

dan — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:33:38 -0700

Are you one of those people whose day is driven by the latest email someone has lobbed into your inbox? Do you feel like you're chronically a half-step slow in managing your work? If so, try using your calendar as a kanban. (For the lean novices, a kanban is a signaling system to trigger the right amount of production at the right time.)

In an earlier post I wrote about the need to "live in your calendar" rather than your inbox. By designating dates and times for specific tasks and projects, you’ve essentially created a production schedule for your work, with the calendar (and the calendar alerts) acting as a kanban that pulls work forward.

Now, I can hear your objection: “a real pull-based system of work would have me responding to the incoming messages as they arrive. Living in the calendar leads to batching and inventory creation rather than flow.”

Lowering the Water Level, Redux: You Really Do Have Too Much Time On Your Hands

dan — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:23:09 -0700

The past few weeks I've been obsessed with the relationship between time and efficiency. (Okay, maybe not obsessed. The subject isn't Joan's crappy fate on Mad Men, or Devin Banks on 30 Rock. But I have been writing about it a whole bunch.) Now comes Sue Schellenberger of the Wall Street Journal -- no lean acolyte, she -- who has realized that imposing constraints on her work time forces her to figure out how to work with less waste.

Put away the Blackberry: an alternative to the "always on" ethic.

dan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:16:08 -0700

I'm not a big fan of the Harvard Business Review (or any other business publication, for that matter). It pains me to see so many tress slaughtered in the service of filling the world with self-evident "insights" such as "Treat your customers well," or "Unleash the power of teams!" or "How Baskin-Robbins grew sales by increasing the number of flavors." No, really?

This month's issue, however, has an article that I actually like. Okay, it's true: I like it in part because the findings support the things I've been preaching about for years, and now I've got some proof that I'm right. Or if not proof, at least support for my position.

Planning Managerial Capacity

dan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:56:47 -0700

I've been corresponding with Conor Shea of the Daily Kaizen blog recently about the importance of understanding one's own "production" capacity, and how that ties into the lean journey. We've both noticed that managers are terrible at taking the time to really think about what needs to be done -- and what shouldn't be done. As Conor says,

the inability to strategically and systematically stop work is one of our biggest issues, and this of course can trace back to the hundreds of leaders who aren't able to do this as individuals.
I've written before (as has Matt May) about the importance of stopping work. While it's very easy to take on more projects and responsibilities, it's *stopping* work that's critical to getting out of the office and meetings, and into the gemba where the learning happens.

5S makes you better.

dan — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:51:40 -0700

As you've probably read here ad nauseum, 5S is a fundamental part of lean. It helps you to spot abnormalities in a process or a system so that you can make improvements.

But can it make you a better manager? Or entrepreneur? Or venture capitalist? Or journalist?

Although 5S is traditionally applied to the physical environment, I believe that it isn't just applicable to physical space -- you know, "a place for everything and everything in it's place." In a larger sense, 5S can be applied to time as well. It's an awkward locution, but think about having "a time for everything, and everything at the right time. And that means time to think and plan as well, not just react to the latest fire.

Standard work and the folly of multitasking.

dan — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:24:24 -0700

I've been harping on this for a long time, but since there's new information I figure that it's worth saying again: multitasking doesn't work. The latest blow to that myth is from researchers at Stanford University:

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found. "They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers. "Everything distracts them."

Further tests showed that compared to light multitaskers, heavy multitaskers perform worse on memory tests because they're struggling to retain more information in their brains at any given time. And in a beautiful display of irony, heavy multitaskers suck at switching between tasks:

Visual Management, Production Schedules, and the Tyranny of the Urgent

dan — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:45:39 -0700

“Value added work takes a lot of time, is unglamorous and is often not as important to my boss as the crisis of the day.”
You hear it constantly: spend time on improvement work, not just the daily grind. Yet in your world you face a nearly unending stream of crises that demand your attention, from trivial ("Hey, anyone know how to fix a copier jam?") to major ("The jig's up on the Death Star strategy. We're about to be indicted."). Which begs the question: how do you make the time for the value-added, improvement work that's necessary for the lean journey?

Lee Fried's Daily Kaizen blog, which chronicles the lean efforts at Group Healthcare, addressed this problem last month. One of the managers talked about her struggle to escape the "tyranny of the urgent" so that she could spend time on improvement work:

One reason why so many lean initiatives fail

dan — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:26:33 -0700

You've been through it before: the big cheese in the corner office with the reserved parking space decides to jump on lean, spends piles of money on consultants, launches a 5S campaign which is met with enthusiasm, and then. . . it fizzles.

To turn the old adage on its head, failure has many fathers. I won't presume to catalog all of them -- really, how boring is that? -- but I do want to address one: not living lean in all aspects of work.

All too often, lean is applied out there -- to the assembly line, or the medical equipment supply closet, or the insurance underwriting process. But it's not applied at home. It's something to do, not something to live.

Is your environment helping your lean efforts?

dan — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:30:09 -0700

Many lean transformations (and more broadly, "change management initiatives") fail because the organizational environment isn't conducive to making and sustaining that change. As a result, it's tough for people in that environment to alter their behaviors.

A case in point: at a company I once worked at, we had a consulting group come in and tell us (for a large fee, of course) that lack of clear communication from the exec team was one of the behaviors causing problems. They advocated open door policies for individuals, and avoidance of closed-door meetings for the team. Ironically, this advice was given in a closed door meeting with the execs -- and that should tell you just how far this idea went.

It's about the system, not the individual

dan — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:31:06 -0700

I've often railed against the colossal waste of time, effort, and energy in the offices of knowledge workers around the globe. If you could only hear, in Ross Perot's term, the "giant sucking sound" of managerial time wasted by pointless meetings and useless emails, you'd run screaming from the building and immediately become a farmer so you could actually get some work done without interruption. (See previous posts here and here for some sense of how big a problem this is.)

Standard work, by any other name....

dan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:30:03 -0700

Peter Bregman, head of his eponymous management consulting company, makes a compelling case for standard work in a recent blog post at Harvard Business Publishing. He writes that recently his work day went quickly and quietly down the toilet as he was ambushed by emails, solving other people's problems, and fire-fighting, all of which kept him from getting done what was really important. He points out that even with his daily to-do lists,
the challenge, as always, is execution. How can you stick to a plan when so many things threaten to derail it? How can you focus on a few important things when so many things require your attention?
Bregman looks to Jack LaLanne for the answer:

Would you like some fries with that visual management?

dan — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:46:31 -0700

Listening to Michael Krasny's Forum interview with David Kessler (former head of the Food and Drug Administration and author of the new book, The End of Overeating), I heard an example of visual management tools from an unlikely place -- the Google cafeteria.

Google's cafeteria is legendary for the variety, quality, and price (free!) of the food and snacks it serves. As you might imagine, with that much food there's a real danger of employees, um, overgrazing at the trough. So Google uses visual management -- red, yellow, and green placards in front of the food -- to help employees monitor what they eat. The green cards in front of fruits and vegetables mean "go crazy -- have all you want." The yellow cards mean "moderate quantities are okay." The red cards mean "just a taste," and are placed in front of the Krispy Kreme donuts and fried pork rinds.

How lean is your own behavior?

dan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:02:17 -0700

Recently, I was struck by something that Bob Miller, Executive Director for The Shingo Prize said: "A culture of lean is present when the day to day behaviors of every person reflect a deep understanding and commitment to the principles."

I see a huge gap between this description of a lean culture and the culture in most organizations pursuing lean. In general, lean seems to be something that's done to something else, not to oneself. (If you remember your college Psych 101 class, this is called the "Other.") People are committed to making a process like strategic planning lean by moving to hoshin kanri. Or they apply lean to a production line by creating cells and pull systems.

There's nothing wrong with this, of course; that's required for eliminating waste and creating value for customers. But I'd argue that it's not enough. Lean also needs to be applied to oneself -- to the way we act and think.

Hansei, "stop doing," and exiting a market.

dan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:52:08 -0700

Sunday's NYTimes Corner Office interview of Clarence Otis, Jr. (CEO of Darden Restaurants, which owns Red Lobster, Olive Garden and Capital Grille) made me think about an oft-forgotten element of lean: the process of hansei, or reflection. We focus so much on *doing* stuff during the day, and figuring out how to *do* even more stuff, that we often forget that the post-mortem is just as important as the project itself. After all, it's the reflection after the work is done that provides the information that enables the company to replicate success (or avoid the same failure).

In response to the interviewer's question about time management, Otis answers,

I schedule and block the calendar to have downtime, because I do think that in senior leadership positions, one of your jobs is to reflect, and you have to schedule time to do that. I try to leave a few hours a week that are unscheduled.

Jim Collins lives lean (part 2)

dan — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:34:06 -0700

Last week I pointed to an interview with Jim Collins (Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall) to show how he not only embraces, but truly lives, key lean principles like visual management and productive maintenance. Another recent interview in Inc. demonstrates his relentless drive to eliminate waste in his core production function: processing information and creating new ideas.

Jim Collins Lives Lean

dan — Wed, 27 May 2009 08:05:22 -0700

Sunday's NYTimes profile of Jim Collins was striking for many reasons, but for me, most notable was the way in which Collins has taken core lean concepts and applied them to his life. He's a reminder that continuous improvement doesn't have to be larded up with Japanese words and icons borrowed from Toyota to be lean.

Visual management? Check.

In a corner of the white board at the end of his long conference room, Mr. Collins keeps this short list:

Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%

That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.

Turning the PDCA goggles on yourself.

dan — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:31:20 -0700

Notwithstanding the Wall Street Journal's recent (and frequent) misunderstandings about lean, a lot of very fine firms with enlightened leadership see lean as the road to lower costs, higher quality, and a better work environment. The investment they make and the results they achieve are impressive, and best of all, the ones that really "get it" know that they're on a never-ending road of improvement. There's always the possibility of eliminating waste from the firm's operations, of reducing wasted inputs.

But my friend Tom asks the following: how lean can a company be when it ignores the enormous amounts of time wasted by workers, managers, and executives?

Are you solving the right problem?

dan — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:46:19 -0700

I worked with an executive assistant recently who was struggling with the burden of producing meeting minutes for meetings that her boss, the CEO of the company, attended. And it wasn't just her problem, either: the team of six assistants in the executive suite were all spending inordinate amounts of time on the same task. In fact, this EA calculated that the team was spending 25% of their time -- the equivalent of 1.5 FTE months each month -- just producing meeting minutes.

Her initial approach to this problem was to sign everyone up for a SkillPath class so they could learn to take notes more quickly. In her view, EAs didn't have the skills they needed to transcribe efficiently. To be sure, with better note-taking and transcription skills, they would have speeded the process immensely.

Black belts, magicians, and the willing suspension of disbelief.

dan — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:58:13 -0700

My friend, Roger, leads the lean initiative at a health care system in Florida. Roger is a 23-year veteran of GE Healthcare, with more than his share of colored belts and fancy titles ("Quality Leader") to his name. He knows his 3 Ps, his 4Ms, his 5Ss, his 6 Sigmas, and his 7 Wastes inside and out. He's a damn nice guy, an amateur magician, and -- as I discovered over the past few weeks -- quite the philosopher about his work.

Shameless Self-Promotion: I'm sleepy today edition

dan — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:45:45 -0700

It's been a paiful three weeks of travel for me, with the result that I'm a bit shy in the clever, stunningly incisive, and trenchant blog posts you've come to know and love. Consequently, I'm scraping the bottom of the imagination barrel and referring you to a podcast I did recently with Liz Lynch.

Liz is a long-time friend, an outstanding businessworman, and a networking maven. She's also the author of Smart Networking, a wonderful book for people who get creeped out by the idea of putting on a suit and carrying a stack of business cards to a "networking function" where you shake lots of strangers' hands and exchange empty platitudes about "reaching out" and "finding synergies."

Immutable laws of nature.

dan — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:30:00 -0700

We accept certain facts as immutable laws of nature: hydrogen has a molecular weight of one. E=MC2. The Wall Street Journal will complain about the Obama stimulus package. Britney Spears will do something to land herself on the cover of People. The volume of email you get each year will inexorably increase.

I'm struck by the fatalism in this last assumption. There's a whiff of resignation, a kind of tragic foreknowledge that next year will indeed suck more than this year, at least in terms of email. (That is, unless you actually enjoy being inundated by email, because it makes you feel important. In which case skip the rest of this post and send an email to the company-wide distribution list asking for feedback on the firm's mission statement.)

Why isn't "thinking time" part of your standard work?

dan — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:32:10 -0700

I'm continually struck by the relentless, frenzied pace that people maintain at work. Whether it's an engineer at a high-tech startup in which speed is part of the company's DNA, or an attorney at a law firm who insists she has to respond immediately (if not sooner) to a client's call, or the head of a non-profit focused on building community support for the organization's mission, everyone is obsessed with speed and responsiveness.

But does a myopic focus on one aspect of performance really lead to the best results? Are we sacrificing quality on the altar of speed?

Sunday's Corner Office interview in the NYTimes was striking for the assertion -- once again -- that there's nothing more important than taking time away to (gasp!) actually think. John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, says

Management Poka-Yoke

dan — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:13:41 -0700

We're accustomed to thinking of poka-yoke (error-proofing) as something for a manufacturing assembly line, or at the very least, for a machine. In this standard conception, there are fail-safe devices (some cool, some pretty basic) to ensure errors are prevented. Electric eyes in elevators keep doors from closing on people. Some hotel rooms are equipped with a room key holder that turns off the power when the key is removed to prevent electricity from flowing to the room when it's vacant. Gas caps on cars are attached with a cord to prevent drivers from leaving it on the roof. (I left a cap near Grants Pass, OR, if anyone happens to see it....)

But why not institute poka-yoke for management? Why not create systems that prevent bad management practices from taking hold?

I thought of this yesterday when reading the NYTimes interview with Kevin Sharer, chief executive of Amgen. When he ascended to the big chair, he talked to the top 150 people in the company one at a time for an hour.

Book Review: In Pursuit of Elegance

dan — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:49:07 -0700

I just finished reading Matt May's excellent new book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing." Matt is a former Toyota University guy and the author of The Elegant Solution.

Management "Moonshots." Really?

dan — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:55:32 -0700

Gary Hamel's recent Management 2.0 blog at WSJ.com features his ideas for "Management Moonshots" -- 25 ambitious and radical ideas that will significantly improve business management in the future. Frankly, I wasn't terribly impressed.

Some of the ideas are important, but already widely recognized, like "expanding and harnessing diversity" and "reducing fear and increasing trust." Other ideas are just turgid, jargon-laden, consultant-speak, like "de-structuring and disaggregating the organization." (Huh? Where was he when Citigroup and AIG were building themselves into "too big to fail" institutions? Probably preaching about economies of scale.)

But what really struck me was prevalence of ideas that are a fundamental and widely-practiced aspect of lean thinking. Check out these "moonshot" ideas:

Does Innovation Stem From Corporate Culture?

dan — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:50:04 -0800

"Innovation" seems to be the buzzword of the year. (Well, after "bailout," "meltdown," and "Can you BELIEVE how much Bobby Jindal sucked?!?") You can hardly open the WSJ without someone pontificating about the need for innovation, the threat to innovation, the five keys to innovation, the hidden secrets of innovation, blah, blah, blah.

In a change from all the bloviation about innovation, Terri Kelly, the CEO of W.L. Gore (the nice folks behind Gore-Tex and Glide dental floss, among other fine products) gave a refreshingly clear, jargon-free talk at the MIT business school about how the company's culture fosters innovation. For those of you who don't know, Gore is famous for not having any titles; everyone is simply an "associate." (Well, virtually no titles. Kelly is obviously the "CEO," so there are a few. But only when necessary.)

Flies in the Urinals.

dan — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:33:59 -0800

The NYTimes reports that the flies in the men’s-room urinals of the Amsterdam airport have been enshrined in the academic literature on economics and psychology. The flies — images of flies, actually — were etched in the porcelain near the urinal drains in an experiment in human behavior. After the flies were added, “spillage” on the men’s-room floor fell by 80 percent.

According to Richard Thaler, behavioral economist at the University of Chicago and the co-author (along with Cass Sunstein) of "Nudge," the explanation is simple: men like to aim at targets. Thaler says the flies are his favorite example of a “nudge” — a harmless bit of engineering that manages to “attract people’s attention and alter their behavior in a positive way, without actually requiring anyone to do anything at all.”

Thaler and Sunstein call this type of behavioral modification “libertarian paternalism," a phrase that links the opposing concepts of freedom from constraint and firm, well-intentioned guidance.

The waste of staying up to date.

dan — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:43:43 -0800

Back in December (yes, I'm a bit slow at this stuff), Seth Godin wrote about the "High Cost of Now." He argues that there's a clear relationship between how new something is and how much it costs to discover that news. In other words, the closer you get to the source and moment of information, the more it costs.

If you want to know how the stock market did in 2006, you can spend ten seconds and find it in Wikipedia. If you want to know about today, you'll need to invest a few clicks and you'll get the delayed results. Or you could pay a lot of money for a stock market terminal and get the current prices. Or you could even risk prison and get some inside information about what's going to happen before it happens.

Seth makes the connection to our habit of incessant grazing in the email inbox:

And the Nobel Prize for efficiency goes to. . . Nielsen!

dan — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:57:40 -0800

[corrected spelling of the Nielsen Company amended; thanks Robert]

The Nielsen Company has just deleted the "Reply All" button on the computers of their 35,000 employees worldwide.

IORG (via TechCrunch) reports that the giant research company, fed up with the deluge of irrelevant email messages and the waste of time they cause,

has finally come up with an adequate solution to cluttered e-mail inboxes and inefficiency in office environments: [removing] the reply-to-all button from the messaging software.

Can social-network analysis help in a lean transformation?

dan — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:07:07 -0800

Monday's Wall Street Journal had a fascinating article on how companies are using "social-network analysis" to understand communication patterns within the firm. A software program shows the informal ties among employees by creating a map of their interactions.

As global organizations struggle to improve cooperation between geographically disparate teams and also among the functional silos that often don't communicate well, this kind of tool might be valuable. The engineering firm MWH, for example found that communication flowed well within offices, but not between them. To break open those bottlenecks, one of the company's executives

sent U.S. workers to fill vacation openings in the U.K., because the analysis showed those groups didn't talk much. He hired executive coaches for his top managers to help them become less authoritarian and more collaborative. When the director of the Pasadena group resisted, he re-assigned her engineers to others.

The maps help individuals adjust and improve their own performance as well:

Yet another form of muda.

dan — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:13:28 -0800

I recently worked with the director of a large research institution. He's a brilliant scientist, one of those guys with a brain the size of a planet, enough advanced degrees to wallpaper a small office, and memberships in all the clubs for super-smarty-pants. As an administrator, however, he's not quite in the same league.

Although he has an extremely competent assistant, he refuses to dedicate time to meeting with her. Often they'll go two or three days without talking to each other. When it's a choice between talking to one of his scientists about the latest research project or meeting with his assistant, it's a no-brainer: cool science always trumps administrative responsibilities.

Unfortunately, this has a cost. Sometimes they miss deadlines. In once case, it was for a very large government grant. Often, the assistant has to spend much of her day chasing him around the 12-story building, trying to get his signature on a form or a decision on a commitment. And then there's the issue of what she could be accomplishing instead of engaging in her daily scavenger hunt for the boss.

"The leader is the relentless architect of the possibility that others can be."

dan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:18:44 -0800

Conductor and music teacher Benjamin Zander is an unlikely source for lean lessons. In his increasingly high profile role as corporate speaker on leadership, however, he shows that the lessons of lean leadership applies to the orchestra pit every bit as much as to the factory floor and the accounting office.

A common description of the lean approach to leadership is to lead as though you have no authority. This approach eliminates the traditional "command and control" method of management. Instead, it necessitates leaders to acquire knowledge and experience that will enable them to *earn* the respect, loyalty, and support of their staff.

Zander's approach to conducting an orchestra is strikingly similar. He says that the great conductors are like any other great leader: they understand that because they don't make a sound (only the musicians actually make music), their true power “derives from [their] ability to make others powerful.” From Zander's perspective, in this model of leadership

Seven things you may not know about me.

dan — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:54:14 -0800

Tim Walker, from the Business Insight Zone blog, tagged me with this meme: seven things about business and my own career that you (probably) don't know. Tim's blog is one that I read regularly for both his clarity of thought and his stimulating questions, so although there are other things I could be doing today (planning for 2009, vacuuming up cat fur, procrastinating, etc.), I figure that I owe him at least this much for a year's worth of brain food.

1. I'm a Stanford MBA, have been laid off twice, and fired twice. Why is this important? Because I've seen plenty of organizations get by without my services. No matter how important I thought I was, no matter how inconceivable the prospect that these firms could survive without my brilliant contribution, they did. And this experience has changed my perspective towards email/phone responsiveness within a company. The truth is, no one is so important that they need to answer every email, every phone call, every knock on the cubicle wall immediately. Life -- and the company -- will most likely get by without your input. At least for an hour.

The basic unit of knowledge is a question.

dan — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:15:10 -0800

"The basic unit of knowledge is a question." This is a common saying at Toyota, where hierarchical, authority-based leadership is eschewed in favor of responsibility-based leadership. Which is to say that people at the top of the corporate food-chain don't drive all the decisions just because they sit in an Aeron chair and have a big desk.

Rather, people throughout the organization, using the A3 process (excellent description and case study available here) are not only given the responsibility, but are EXPECTED -- to solve problems by asking questions, and developing and testing possible solutions. As John Shook explains,

Cutting the (electronic) umbilical cord.

dan — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:09:51 -0800

Last week I wrote about the difficulty people have in unplugging from their email:

I've preached the gospel of setting aside uninterrupted work time to my clients, but with limited success. Environmental factors -- among them, the (perceived) need to seem immediately responsive, the fear of missing an urgent email, the desire to have one's direct reports jump when called -- and long-established work habits overwhelm the new ideas.

So what is to be done?

That's not a simple question to answer. There are many ways to improve the situation, depending on your particular work environment, your particular work requirements, and -- most importantly -- your idiosyncratic personal needs.

Solving problems with the A3: Infomania

dan — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:29:15 -0800

“In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought” – Michael Crichton

NY Times columnist Tom Friedman looks forward to it. The VP of product development at a large software company looks forward to it. My wife looks forward to it. So do a host of other businesspeople. Despite the TSA check-in hassle, the cramped seats, the lousy service, and the inevitable delays, all these folks -- and probably you, too -- look forward to business travel. And it ain't for the free pretzels.

It's for the hours of uninterrupted work time. No cell phones, no email, no pop-ins to see if you if you want to join the baby shower for Laura in the break room. It's remarkable how much work people seem to get done during this time -- and how much they treasure it.

If it's so important and so rewarding, why do we find it so difficult to make that time for ourselves (and our colleagues) during the work day? Why do we foster environments in which interruptions are the norm, while the uninterrupted blocks of quiet work time are rarer than a Coelacanth?

(Shameless) self-promotion edition.

dan — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:02:56 -0800

Due to some hectic travel this past week, I didn't have time to write one of my long, elegant, beautifully reasoned blog posts. However, Mark Graban, a good friend of this blog and a mentor of mine, has done a wonderful job of making me sound moderately intelligent with a podcast on his website. Check it out here.

And if you'd rather read than listen, Simpleology is running an article I wrote on three things you can do to help you focus on what's really important. (Hint: it's not checking email.) Simpleology is an interesting site with some wonderful tools and advice to help you crawl out of the morass of your day. It's worth poking around for awhile.

Now, go out and vote.

The Wall Street Journal gets it wrong on 5S

dan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 06:03:15 -0700

Poor Dan Brown. He's the "5S Cop" at Kyocera, responsible for hounding employees into compliance with the company's "Perfect 5S" policies. Unfortunately, the way Kyocera implements 5S is, in the words of Mark Graban, more LAME than Lean.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a disappointingly credulous and simplistic article on Kyocera's 5S initiative that completely missed the fact that what Kyocera is doing is not, in fact, 5S. It's obnoxious, anal-retentive rule enforcement that breeds resentment, frustration, and cynicism among workers.

5S is a philosophy and an organizational tool to improve efficiency by reducing waste in the workspace. It is not simply neatness for the sake of neatness. But you know you've got problems when Kyocera policy

Batching is not (necessarily) a dirty word.

dan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:11:12 -0700

One-piece flow (or single-piece flow) is one of the core concepts of lean manufacturing. The idea is that we should produce one item at a time, when the customer needs it. This concept stands in opposition to batch-and-queue production, in which we make a whole bunch of one thing, then make a bunch of the next thing, etc. A lean car factory might make one green Corolla, then one blue Camry, then one red Yaris, for example, while a mass production factory would make 100 black Wranglers, then 100 purple Cherokees. For many reasons, it's way more efficient to run the factory the first way rather than the second.

But while batch-and-queue production isn't the best way to run a factory, in many respects it is the best way for you to work. Why? Because unlike the single-task machines on a production line, you perform many types of operations: talking on the phone, writing emails, building spreadsheets, reviewing proposals, solving a problem with one of your colleagues, dunking Krispy Kremes in your latte, etc. The need (and ability) to do so many types of things makes you a "monument machine."

What would Taiichi Ohno do?

dan — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:11:54 -0700

Today's post is a question that I'm grappling with, rather than an answer (or any theoretically profound advice).

As I've written about before (here and here), 5S is fundamental to a lean transformation. A lot of people who wear more expensive suits than I do would probably go further, and say that it's the most important step: without the discipline of 5S embedded within the workplace, there's no hope of creating a sustainable improvement.

Kaizen vs. Kaikaku

dan — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:29:54 -0700

A very thought-provoking quote from Toyota's president, Katuaki Watanabe in HBR (via Mark Graban, via The Association Renewal blog):

There’s no genius in our company. We just do whatever we believe is right, trying every day to improve every little bit and piece. But when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution.
In lean terms, there are two kinds of improvement. The familiar one is kaizen, which refers to steady but incremental improvement. The other is kaikaku, which means revolution, or radical improvement.

Kaizen is boring and laborious. Kaikaku is sexy and exciting. Kaizen is your spouse of 15 years. Kaikaku is the smoking hot blonde on the barstool next to you.

Congratulations. You've mapped out the future state. Now what?

dan — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:03:09 -0700

Value stream mapping (VSM) is a Lean technique used to analyze the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. Companies use VSM to help them identify and eliminate waste and inefficiency in a process. If you've ever wondered why it takes four weeks for your company to reimburse your travel expenses, or why you have to give your bank account number to a customer service rep after you've already keyed it in on your phone, you're looking at processes that could seriously benefit from value stream mapping.

How to make big things happen.

dan — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:01:18 -0700

Long-time readers of this blog understand the connection I draw between Lean manufacturing and methods for making knowledge workers more efficient. A key element of lean is the elimination of waste in all forms -- from the trivial (the waste of paper clips) to the major (the waste of repairing defective products) to the tragic (the waste of human potential).

A recent interview with Professor John Kotter in strategy+business highlights just how important the elimination of waste really is. In talking about Lou Gerstner's early days at IBM, Kotter says,

Standard Work: breaking down projects

dan — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:22:51 -0700

I often see people at their desks, struggling to make progress on their large projects. Every time they hunker down to start working on one, they get pulled away by something more urgent ("Hurry! The boss needs you to change the spreadsheet font to Geneva!"), and they don't get back to the project. Or they despair at the enormity or complexity of the project, and they don't get started at all. Or they haven't clearly defined the specific steps involved in driving the project to a successful conclusion, and they wallow in a morass of ambiguity, unable to make any progress. In so doing, they're dooming themselves to a (metaphorical) all-nighter right before the project is due -- and imposing a real burden on their coworkers.

As I've said many times before, you're on a production line every bit as real as one in a Toyota plant. Except that you're not making cars; you're making ideas. (Carbon neutral, and with much better gas mileage.) And this is no way to run a production line.

Learning to say no. (Or, how to avoid muri in two easy steps.)

dan — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:12:43 -0700

I see it all the time, and you probably do, too: workers complaining that they can't get everything done. They have too many projects, too many tasks, too many emergencies that need to be handled. The result? They're stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed. They miss dinner with their families. They work on weekends. They miss milestones. And inevitably, some of their work responsibilities just drop off the radar and don't get done.

In lean terms, this is called muri. Literally, muri means "impossible" or "unreasonable." In the context of lean production, muri takes on the meaning of "overburden," as in asking workers to do too much in too little time, or making them comply with onerous policies or practices, or not giving them the tools or the staff to accomplish their work. (Here are two excellent and more detailed descriptions of muri: 1, 2)

Step away from the computer.

dan — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:33:42 -0700

Lee Gomes, one of the technology columnists for the Wall Street Journal, wrote a piece last week pleading for the next president to avoid spending too much time on a computer. He poses a succinct, powerful question that all of use would do well to consider: Does anyone who spends all day in front of a PC, forging a river of data posing as information, have any time to think?

He relates the following story:

A group of technology reporters once received the CEO of a midsize, low-tech company eager to impress his listeners with his connectedness. He described his day as one long session checking emails and news alerts, save for the occasional interruption of a staff meeting or a sales call.

What's the purpose of all this efficiency stuff, anyway?

dan — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:48:57 -0700

The NYTimes reported that Barack Obama met Tory leader David Cameron during his visit to England last week. Cameron asked Obama if he will be taking any time off for a vacation this summer:

Mr. Cameron: Do you have a break at all?

Mr. Obama: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be ...

Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.

Mr. Obama: Right. ... In 15 minute increments and ...

Making knowledge work visible: political edition.

dan — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:52:34 -0700

As I've written about many times before, one of the principles of lean manufacturing is making work visible. Of course, on a production line it's easy to see the toaster go past your station. It's not always so easy for the knowledge worker, whose work goes by in a blast of bits and bytes. But it's no less important. Seeing the flow of the value stream enables you to plan your work, spot places where things are going awry, and focus more clearly on the ultimate goal. This point was made abundantly clear in a recent profile of Steve Schmidt, who recently took charge of John McCain's presidential campaign.

The Wall Street Journal describes Schmidt as a hard-driving, intense man (Sgt. Schmidt is his nickname), who makes everything visible:

How do you change lousy work habits?

dan — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:28:51 -0700

I've squandered countless electrons on this blog presenting ideas for working more efficiently. And yet, for all the time I've invested in these posts and in one-on-one coaching of clients, making real, sustainable, behavioral change is difficult. No matter how simple the concepts, getting people to work differently -- to change their behaviors -- is not easy. Let's face it: if it were, there'd be no fat people waddling into Cold Stone Creamery for a triple scoop of Rocky Road ice cream with Milk Duds mixed in.

But what if the key to behavioral change lies in the marketing of the new habits, and changing the environment, rather than in simply teaching the habits themselves?

An article in the NYTimes last week discussed the challenge that Dr. Val Curtis, an anthropologist, faced in getting residents of Ghana to wash their hands after going to the bathroom. Her goal was to reduce the spread of diseases and disorders (like diarrhea) caused by dirty hands.

Does standard work apply to CEOs?

dan — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:45:31 -0700

"Standard Work" is one of the key principles of lean, because it helps to eliminate waste and allows problems to be identified quickly. Knowledge workers often bristle at the notion that their complex and highly variable jobs can be described by standard work. But as I've written before, much of the variability and complexity that we assume is intrinsic to our jobs isn't. With a bit of creativity (here, for example), we can begin to create standard work for many of the processes that we didn't think could be standardized.

Surgeons need to wash their hands. You need to keep your desk clean.

dan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:17:08 -0700

I just got back from Germany, where I spoke to the European subsidiary of a large U.S. manufacturing company. The audience was composed of both individual contributors and managing directors, and although the speech was well received, it was clear that the managing directors were a bit disappointed: they wanted me to talk more about big-picture strategic issues, rather than on the mundane details of keeping their desks clean, or dealing with emails, or managing meetings.

I could understand their feelings -- they figured that the banality of keeping their desks clean and their inboxes empty had little or nothing to do with the challenges they face on a daily basis. (How do we winnow down the 153 product initiatives we're considering? How do we raise revenue per employee? Should we exit a market we've been in for 15 years but that has diminishing profit potential?)

Fighting the Email Monster

dan — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:43:58 -0700

Yesterday's NYTimes featured an article addressing the steps that some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google, and I.B.M., are taking to stanch the overwhelming flood of email. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.

And why are they taking this step?

Their effort comes as statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused.

The big chip maker Intel found in an eight-month internal study that some employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions said they were more productive and creative as a result.

Kaizen and self-efficacy

dan — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:54:50 -0700

James Surowiecki of The New Yorker recently wrote about Toyota's astonishing success since the end of World War II. Central to his article is the Japanese concept of kaizen, or incremental improvement. As he describes it,

When waste masquerades as work.

dan — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:43:14 -0700

Garr Reynolds' excellent blog, Presentation Zen, points out that the president of Toyota Motor Company is urging employees to stop using Powerpoint for the creation of documents. (By the way, if you want to learn how to make better presentations, you can't do better than to read Garr's blog and buy his book. You'll never think about Powerpoint the same way again. And your audiences will thank you for it.) Garr writes,

There are no rollover minutes in life.

dan — Mon, 26 May 2008 07:21:53 -0700

Last week I wrote about the need to treat your time as a limited resource, like your salary. As with your income, you have to spend it wisely -- you don't want to squander your time playing Howard Carter on an archaeological dig for the latest version of a budget when you could be doing something important, like actually solving a customer's problem.

You can take the metaphor (about money and time, not the one about Howard Carter) one step further: just as you have to save money for unanticipated emergencies -- a root canal, a new transmission, hospitalization for your dog -- so too do you have to save time for the unanticipated crises at work. Perhaps the CEO needs a new headcount reduction plan, or the dye in your new product is bleeding, or someone finds PCB's in the caulk surrounding the windows in the public schools -- you may not know what the precise emergency is, but you can be pretty sure that you're going to lose 30-40% of each day to putting out these fires.

Avoiding temporal bankruptcy.

dan — Sun, 18 May 2008 11:16:11 -0700

The NYTimes's Shifting Careers column addressed the problem of information overload last Friday. The column reminded me of a fundamental reality: that although our time is finite, the demands on our time are infinite. Whether we work 40, 50, or 100 hours per week, there's a definite limit to what we can accomplish.

Even if we were physically able to work 24 hours a day, everyday, we'd never get to the bottom of our to-do list (or our email inboxes). There will always be one more call to make, one more problem to solve, one more email to write. We have to abandon the fantasy that staying at the office later, or working weekends, is the solution to getting to the bottom of the inbox or the to-do list.

We have to treat our time like we treat our money: as a limited resource that must be budgeted. And just as we first allocate money to the most important things in life -- food & shelter -- so, too, must we allocate our time to the most important stuff in our work.

How we put a man on the moon without email

dan — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:50:41 -0700

Last week I worked with a group of R&D engineers at a high-tech company. As for so many others, the blessing of email has turned into the bane of their existence. Each person gets a minimum of 200 emails per day (the vast majority of which aren't terribly important or relevant), and the burden of reading all that email keeps them from spending time on the stuff that's really important to their customers.

After I pointed out that email is nothing more than the high-tech equivalent of two dixie cups and a string -- just a way of transmitting information, but not actually one's job -- one of the engineers wondered how NASA's engineers managed to put a man on the moon without tools like email. His point, of course, was that despite the problems caused by email, in the end there's a net gain in productivity.

Forget about hiring the business guru.

dan — Tue, 06 May 2008 10:18:54 -0700

An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal identified the current breed of hot business gurus. For $50,000-75,000 a speech, they'll help you and your company address the challenges of globalization, motivation, and innovation.

Harvard professor Gary Hamel is one of the gurus profiled. His latest book, The Future of Management, strives to help companies create a culture of innovation. In his words,

It seemed to me that getting large organizations to be persistently innovative was akin to getting a dog to walk on its hind legs. The moment you turned your back, it was down on all fours again.

What does your customer really need?

dan — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:47:53 -0700

I've been working this week with the finance department of an $18 billion company. They're creating value stream maps of their forecasting process in order to reduce the time it takes to roll up the financials from the 100 countries in which they do business. As with most companies, an internal process like this has grown without much planning, and it's now pretty damn messy. People spend days gathering data, inputting into Excel spreadsheets, then uploading to an SAP system. . . all for internal customers (the CFO, investor relations, and to some extent, the country managers) who don't really need all that data.

The Cost of Disorganization

dan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:08:27 -0700

Yesterday I met a woman who worked as the head fundraiser for a state senator. Talented, skilled, driven, and sharing a political vision with the senator, she seemed to have been in the ideal job. She quit after six months.

Conflict of ideology? Sex scandal? Financial shenanigans? Nope, nope, and nope.

Disorganization. She left because the senator's chief of staff couldn't manage the workflow in the office and organize the commitments that needed to be fulfilled. It wasn't the chief of staff's messy desk that was the problem, either. It's that the chief of staff had a nasty habit of handing off work that needed to be done by the next morning around 6pm the night before -- because she wasn't on top of her work. Faced with a non-stop series of "emergencies" that forced her to stay late at the office, the fundraiser quit. And she was followed by several more staffers over the next few months, because the environment had grown so toxic and stressful.

How to apply standard work to meetings

dan — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:24:29 -0700

I've been writing a lot recently about standard work, and how it can reduce waste and improve efficiency. But knowledge workers often feel that standard work isn't applicable to their jobs, because they're so highly variable and unpredictable. This simply isn't true.

Let's take meetings (please). If your meetings are like those in most organizations, they're flaccid, bloated, puffy things have half the attendees struggling to control hypnic jerks and the other half checking their Blackberries.

How do you manage two dozen direct reports?

dan — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:39:20 -0700

Since the 1930s, conventional managerial wisdom held that seven to 10 direct reports was optimal. However, the Wall Street Journal reports that this notion is being challenged.

Assigning more workers to each boss started catching on during the corporate restructuring pushes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when flatter organizational models took hold. Now some consultants are urging companies to loosen their views of supervising, so organizations can run with fewer bosses. Research in Europe suggests that a manager can oversee 30 or more employees, in part by using technology to communicate and help monitor work. . . . The researchers offered several possible reasons for managers' increased span of control, the technical term for how many workers are being supervised. Improved communications techniques may "help managers leverage their knowledge, solve more problems and supervise larger teams," they wrote.

Avoiding the priority trap.

dan — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:48:08 -0700

The magnetic pull to check your email every 10, or 5, or 2 minutes will kill you. Not literally, of course. As far as I know, your personal health won't suffer from peering into your inbox like a cat into a fish tank. But the relentless pull of the inbox on your attention will almost certainly prevent you from attending to what's really important to your customers and your company.

It's important to realize that processing email is a piece of work in and of itself. As Merlin Mann elegantly expressed it, processing is more than just checking, but less than responding, to every email. You have to read and assess each email, and then determine what you're going to do with it. That may mean replying, but also may mean deleting, or filing, or designating time at a later date to deal with it. "Processing" takes time.

A root cause approach to email overload

dan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:01:14 -0700

I've just returned from the Lean Enterprise Institute's Lean Transformation Summit where I ran two workshops on applying lean ideas to the individual desktop. I've covered many of those topics in this blog before, but the discussions with the participants got me thinking: maybe my approach is wrong.

For example, I've spilled a lot of electronic ink (fortunately, electrons are cheap) telling you how to manage email. But I'm now wondering whether my advice has merely been addressing the symptoms, and not the actual problem. Which is to say, I'm giving advice on how to handle email once it's hit your inbox. But perhaps I should be focusing more on the root cause of all those emails.

Batching vs. One-Piece Flow

dan — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:55:13 -0800

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know that many of my ideas about efficient work come from lean manufacturing. This is the framework I use in thinking about how to reduce waste.

One of the ideals of lean manufacturing is single-piece flow: building one item at a time to precisely meet customer pull. In this scenario, there's no buildup of needless inventory, because everything is built to a specific customer's demand. (Chrysler offers a cautionary tale about the consequences of building a giant pile of unsold inventory.) This one-piece flow stands in stark contrast to "batch processing," in which orders are built up to a certain level before production starts, in order to reduce average production cost.

What are you?

dan — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:06:24 -0800

"We are what we repeatedly do." - Aristotle

Ben Worthen of the Biz Tech Blog in the Wall Street Journal published a clever post on an experiment to break his own email addiction. The results are both pathetic and funny, in a "isn't it funny how Milhouse always gets beaten up by Jimbo and Nelson and snubbed by Lisa" kind of way.

Worthen avoided setting heroic goals (checking emails only once a day, say), and opted for something much more modest:

We thought it would be a worthy experiential-journalism project to record how often we checked our email and to share the results with all of you. We planned to do this for a day. We called off the experiment after an hour. The reason: We’d already checked email 12 times, often for no reason at all.

Despite his uncontrollable (and unconscious) need to wallow in the inbox, Worthen retained enough journalistic objectivity to note two bad habits:

The Magnifying Glass and the Prism

dan — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:49:26 -0800

Consider the power of a magnifying glass: it concentrates the sun’s rays and enables you to generate heat and fire (and to inflict needless horror on ants, if you’re nine years old).

Now consider the prism: it refracts light and makes pretty colors.

How do you wield your time and attention at work – as a magnifying glass or as a prism? If you’re like most people, you’re probably getting pretty colors but not much heat. That is to say, you start one task and then allow yourself to be interrupted by phone calls (only some of which are really important), emails (virtually none of which are important), meetings (need I say more?), and knocks on the door. Not only do all these interruptions undermine the quality of your work, but it also takes you longer to get the job done.

The best 10 minutes you can spend.

dan — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:47:53 -0800

Whether you subscribe to David Allen's, Julie Morgenstern's, Laura Stack's, Stephanie Winston's, et al's advice (or mine, for that matter) on productivity, there's a good chance that you don't do everything they recommend. Let's face it: it's a pain in the ass to break old habits (no matter how dysfunctional) and establish new ways of working (no matter how virtuous). If it were easy, there'd be no fat people waddling around the newest branch of Coldstone Creamery.

So if you're not able to swallow the whole productivity System of your choice and enter the promised land of an exquisitely balanced work-life, complete with a mind-like-water, email ninja-moves, and an unlimited supply of stress-free life-hacks and Google tricks -- what should you do?

I think that the weekly (or better yet, daily) review is about the best way to invest 10 minutes of your time. Lord knows, it's not a panacea for what ails you, but if you're only going to do one thing to tame the swirling chaos of your work, this might be it. Here's what to do:

The Danger of Easy Access

dan — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:14:12 -0800

Merlin Mann over at 43Folders has preached long and loud about the danger of being always available to anyone and everyone who needs or wants our help. When we don't value our limited time and attention sufficiently, we open the floodgates to infinite requests from coworkers -- to our detriment.

Don't get me wrong: helping friends or colleagues is a wonderful lubricant for social intercourse. But if the metaphorical or literal door to our offices are always open, it's alarmingly easy to get pulled away from what's really important to our jobs, and we find ourselves spending time proofreading press releases on how our company is leading the market for puppy-themed golf umbrellas.

Why a to-do list just doesn’t work.

dan — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:03:57 -0800

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 in good company.

dan — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:09:26 -0800

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.

One more entry in the chronicles of inanity

dan — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:44:51 -0800

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.

Buying a bigger pair of pants will NOT solve your weight problem.

dan — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 18:30:09 -0800

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.

Will Smith Gets Lean.

dan — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:15:38 -0800

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

What's So Sacred About The 60 Minute Meeting?

dan — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:47:58 -0800

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.

The Lean Approach to Email Management: It's Not About Technology

dan — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:20:35 -0800

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:

Root-cause analysis: Myth #3

dan — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 14:30:38 -0800

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.

Root-cause analysis: Myth #2

dan — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:32:27 -0800

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:

Root-cause analysis: Myth #1

dan — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:27:42 -0800

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.

No wonder she seldom has an orgasm.

dan — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:16:29 -0700

"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

One simple way to get more productive.

dan — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:39:30 -0700

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.

How to avoid wasting all your time in meetings.

dan — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:08:12 -0700

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.

Pay attention, all you law and accounting firm partners

dan — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:14:01 -0700

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.

You don't need no stinkin' stressball.

dan — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 08:55:39 -0700

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.)

5S at 70 mph.

dan — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:08:47 -0700

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?

Istanbul. Not Lean.

dan — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:16:51 -0700

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....

Focus on the product. Not on you.

dan — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:21:08 -0700

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?

Pursuing Perfection

dan — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 17:17:01 -0700

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:

How many messages are languishing in your inbox? Perfection is (in the words of Merlin Mann) "Inbox Zero." Track the number of emails in your inbox the end of each day for about a month and see if you can get that number down to zero on a regular basis.

read more

Backpacking Lean

dan — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 10:39:39 -0700

I just returned from a six-day backpacking trip in Kings Canyon, CA. While I'm not quite as obsessive as Kevin Meyer in turning my vacations into opportunities to think deeply about lean, the lessons from lean thinking were inescapable.

Lesson #1: When you don't have a lot of space, you only schlep what's essential. Backpacks are comparatively small, and I didn't hire any sherpas to stagger through the backcountry with 125 pound loads. That meant that I had to ruthlessly pare down the items that I would take with me. No extra food (3/4 of a pound of dry food per person per day), no extra clothes (you really can make two paris of socks and underwear last for a week), no extra gear that didn't perform a critical function (so much for the solar shower and the lawn chairs).

What's Wrong With This Picture?

dan — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:36:04 -0700

Here's a screenshot from a client's computer. What's wrong with it?

Let's count the windows: 1...2...3...7. We've got three email messages, two Word docs, a spreadsheet, and a Powerpoint presentation open all at once. I'm guessing that had I not announced my arrival, we'd probably have found a game of Solitaire, updates on the ESPN NFL draft, and two different flight reservations for a trip to Aruba, too. And though this client really is pretty good at his job, he still puts his pants on one leg at a time. Which is to say, he can only work on one item at a time.

Interestingly, as we were going through this mess o' windows, he realized that he had forgotten about some of them. One of the email messages was from early in the morning -- he never finished writing the email before getting distracted by something else. And another email he had no idea about at all. He addressed it, but wasn't sure why he was writing to that person.

The Freedom Of Discipline

dan — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:09:11 -0700

Barry Schwartz, a social scientist at Swarthmore, has written a book called The Paradox of Choice. In his view, our nearly unlimited options in cellphones, salad dressing, toilet paper, even careers (dotcom entrepreneur? painter? firefighter?) create suffering for people as they try to find the best option in each of these areas.

Schwartz is primarily concerned with people as consumers (single-ply or two-ply? creamy or chunky? organic or free-range?). But I’d argue that his thinking also applies to people as producers – as workers and employees who must attend to overflowing email boxes, endless to-do lists, stacks of paperwork, and continual meetings. How do you choose what to do? How do you select one item from the four-page to-do list?

It’s simple – too simple – to say, “just focus on the most important item.” It’s not always clear which is the most important. And besides, what’s unimportant for you might be absolutely essential for someone else.

You Have Too Much Time On Your Hands. Really.

dan — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:02:00 -0700

Toyota calls it “lowering the water level.”

Imagine a value stream or a production process as a river. Reducing the inventory in the process – “lowering the water level” – exposes the “rocks” that represent all of the hidden costs and waste in production. Only by revealing those rocks can you improve the process and reduce the waste.

This metaphor works for knowledge workers, too. In this case, however, their key inventory item is time. Having too much time to do one’s work hides the waste and inefficiencies in the process.

The Obesity Epidemic, Part II

dan — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:42:23 -0700

This post received such a strong response when I published it on Evolving Excellence that I'm republishing it here.

* * * * *

On my too-frequent flights to New York recently, I started reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's a trip up and down the food chain from a naturalist's perspective, and one of his first stops is an examination of corn.

Government policies over the years have led to overproduction of this crop, from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to 10 billion bushels today. At the same time, because supply exceeds demand and prices are so low, federal government payments to farmers -- for corn alone -- comes to slightly more than $4 billion.

Hercules And The Hydra

dan — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:18:12 -0700

According to the Greek legend, as one of his Twelve Labors, Hercules had to kill the Hydra -- a nine-headed sea serpent. Not much of a problem for the legendary hero, except for one catch: when he cut off one of the heads, two would grow back. So how to defeat the monster?

Hercules took a different approach. After cutting off each head (or mashing them with his club, depending on the version of the myth you prefer), his nephew, Iolaus, burned the stump of each neck to cauterize it and prevent the new heads from growing back.

You may not be mistaken for Hercules (which isn't a bad thing, really, unless you like wearing a lionskin loincloth to work -- and that's a bit risky, even on Casual Fridays in Silicon Valley), but you have your own Hydra to face: email.

That overflowing email inbox. Cut off one head -- i.e., answer an email -- and two messages come back. No matter how quickly you respond, no matter how thoroughly you answer the question, you just can't get to the bottom of your inbox. Like Hercules, you need a different approach. Simply answering your emails is not the answer.

The Cure For Meeting Bloat

dan — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:41:09 -0700

Have you ever been in a good meeting? I mean, a really good meeting -- one that started and ended on time, one in which everyone knew why they were there and what the objective was, and that actually gave participants the tools to move forward?

Probably not. Or at least, not often. More likely, your meetings are flaccid, bloated, puffy things that have more in common with a UN Security Council debate on the precise definition of "civil war" than with a tactical session to support a new product rollout.

Standard work, one of the cornerstones of the Toyota Production System, can help.

Standard work is often defined as the "the most effective combination of manpower, materials and machinery." In a meeting, of course, the critical resource is time. Thus, the purpose of standard work in a meeting is to specify how to use the allocated time -- and only the allocated time -- most effectively. No running long.

Space: The Final Frontier

dan — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 09:04:50 -0700

A few years ago, Mary Czerwinski, a researcher at Microsoft Research Labs, demonstrated that increasing the amount of real estate on a computer screen dramatically improved productivity. She found that the clearer your screen, the calmer your mind. Czerwinski’s experiments utilized a 42-inch (!) screen, but anyone who has hooked up two or three monitors to their computer understands the value of the added screen space. Switching from one task to another is far easier when you don’t have to toggle between programs (and windows) to find what you need.

That’s what makes this picture of Al Gore’s office so peculiar. Clearly, Al gets the idea that multiple monitors enhance productivity. But look at the rest of the office. It’s a disaster. I’m willing to bet that (1) he doesn’t know what half of the stuff he has piled up is; and (2) at least half of it is obsolete or low-value junk.

Standard Work: The Flywheel of Society

dan — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:27:17 -0700

The American psychologist, William James, believed that creating habits was essential to productivity and efficiency. If you'll bear with me (and his turgid, 19th century prose) for just a bit, you'll see he was quite eloquent on the subject:

The Premack Principle

dan — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:19:39 -0700

David Premack is a behavioral psychologist who discovered that pleasant tasks can be used as a reward for doing unpleasant tasks. (Of course, if you're a parent and have told your child that he could watch TV after cleaning his room, you knew this already. But you need to wear a lab coat and hang with mice to get a principle named after you.)

Why does the Premack Principle matter to you? Unfortunately, we generally work the other way around at the office: we put off the most unpleasant tasks, preferring instead to do other, more enjoyable tasks. As a result, we don’t get around to actually doing those things in a timely fashion. The phone call to the angry customer, the confrontation with our subordinate, the expense report we need to fill out – these are tasks that all too often are postponed.

5S Ain't Just About Hammers

dan — Thu, 10 May 2007 08:10:16 -0700

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Chevron and Credit-Suisse are taking a new approach to data storage. Chevron noticed that digital files (including emails) stored on their servers were growing at 60% per year, with negative effects on the business:

Besides the cost of buying new storage systems, Chevron's employees were spending between 1 1/2 to three days a month just searching for the correct information they needed to do their jobs, taking a toll on productivity, the company found. "We haven't adequately managed all our information," says Lynn Chou, Chevron's general manager of global technology and strategy, adding that the 59,000-person company processes one million emails a day. "There's been a digital tidal wave."

The Priority Trap

dan — Tue, 08 May 2007 08:30:25 -0700

People are consumed by setting priorities. They make to-do lists and carefully note whether it's an "A," "B," or "C" priority.

Here's a question: have you ever gotten to the "C" priority items? Probably not. At least not while it was a "C" priority. Of course, once it became an "A" priority, you got to it, but not before then. The "C" priority dental checkup you didn't schedule? I'm guessing you got to it once you needed a root canal. The "C" priority 60,000 mile auto service? You definitely handled it once your car broke down on the highway. The "C" priority phone call to that customer you don't really like? You probably had to actually visit him once he cancelled his next order.

You've got an infinite amount of work to do and only a finite amount of time in which to do it. So when stuff comes into your system, you shouldn't waste time carefully calibrating its precise priority level. You need to make a simple decision: Are you going to do it or not?

A Nice Collection of Productivity Ideas

dan — Tue, 01 May 2007 10:41:22 -0700

Ben over at The Instigator Blog has launched an interesting group writing project to create The Ultimate Guide to Productivity, a collection of productivity tips from around the blogsphere. As with any effort of this sort, you'll find ideas that work for you next to ideas that make absolutely no sense for the way your brain is wired. No matter -- the real value comes from assessing your work habits, identifying the waste and inefficiencies, and then making appropriate changes.

Here's my contribution: learn to live in your calendar.

Most people don't have a clear plan for their activities and responsibilities for each day, and as a result, they lose time trying to figure out what they should do. Think about the last time you went to the supermarket without a shopping list -- how long did it take you to get out of there? How much money did you spend? If you're like 99% of the population, the answers are "too long" and "too much." And that's for something simple like buying groceries.

The 5S Mind

dan — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:45:16 -0700

Earlier this year, the British press reported on a British government's scandalous £7.4 million consulting contract for a government "office lean" initiative. The consultants applied 5S principles to workers' desks in order to increase their efficiency -- the theory being that a clean desk will result in less time wasted in looking for important documents and supplies -- and they marked desks with tape to indicate where the office equipment should be.

What's All This Lean Business?

dan — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 05:16:04 -0700

WorkLean has nothing to do with Jenny Craig.

Lean is a manufacturing ideaology invented -- and best exemplified -- by Toyota. (Which is on its way to eclipsing GM as the world's largest car maker. And long ago eclipsed GM as the world's most profitable car maker.)

Lean is an all-encompassing way of running a company. I use "way" in the sense of "the way of the warrior" or the "way of the Camaroon pygmies." lt's a comprehensive philosophy that guides a company.

The aspect of Lean most important to me, right now, is the emphasis on eliminating waste. "Waste," in this case, is defined as anything the customer doesn't want to pay for. So the time you spend surfing the web is waste from the customer's perspective. (They don't want to pay for your entertainment. They want to buy your product or service at the lowest possible cost.)

Holy Mismanagement, Batman!

dan — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:35:31 -0700

Quick: get an image in your head of a businessman's office from a movie before the advent of computers. Maybe it's a Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn movie. Maybe it's James Mason in a Hitchcock movie. It doesn't matter as long as it's pre-computer.

Now, think about the desk. It's big. It's mahogony, or maybe walnut. There's a brass lamp on one side with a green shade. There's a phone on the other side. And what's in the middle?

A blotter. And not just any blotter. A blotter with a calendar on it. Because the executive needs to see where's he's been, where he's going, and what his commitments are. He lives in his calendar.

Now, take a look at your desk. What's in the middle? A computer, of course. And most likely, your email is up on the screen. In fact, if you're like most people, that's the first thing you look at in the morning. Not your calendar, but your inbox.

But here's the thing: email is not your work. It's just a communication tool. It enables you to do your work, but it's not actually your value-added work.

Why designating time in your calendar matters

dan — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:30:09 -0700

Swamped by last minute tax filings, Intuit's Turbo Tax e-filing system crashed yesterday. That's bad news for people filing, who had to deal with delays and uncertainty.

This snafu reminds me of a client whose employer required him to take an HR training program on the company's intranet. He put it off for days, then weeks, until the task disappeared from visibility: the email reminders were buried in the thousands of emails sitting in his inbox.

Eventually, he HAD to do the training. . . along with the all the other procrastinators. But the server couldn't handle the load, and as a result it took him four hours to complete the program, instead of the normal 30 minutes.

Surfing the wave with the 4Ds

dan — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:08:55 -0700

How do you handle the tidal wave of incoming stuff that lands on your desk? How do you surf it, instead of getting crushed by it?

Rigorous application of the "4Ds" is the key.

When "stuff" comes at you -- mail, email, phone calls, text messages, a knock on the door from your coworker -- consider that you have four -- and only four -- courses of action.

You can Do it. If it takes two minutes or less, just take care of the task there and then.

You can Delegate it. If you're not the best person to handle something, or if you don't have the most current information, or if you just can't get to the task for three weeks, pass it to someone else. This may be a coworker, or it may be a supervisor. The point is that you need to move this item forward, on the next step towards completion.

Workspace or Storage Space?

dan — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:14:10 -0700

Some quick math for you: You've got about 12.5 square feet of desktop. Total.

Now, take off space for your computer, phone, office supplies, picture of the dog, cup of stale coffee, Jerry Seinfeld bobblehead doll -- and you're probably down to about four square feet of space to work.

Oh, wait. If you're like most people, you've got at least one, and probably three, piles of paper just sitting on your desk. You know, the stuff that you're planning on getting to, but just haven't found the time. That's another two square feet gone.

Now you have two square feet in which to work. To think. To plan. To figure out how to get from here to there. Or, if you’re like the partner at a large accounting firm I once worked with, your desk is nothing but piles of paper, and there’s NO room to actually work. (He spent all his time in a conference room.)

Feeling claustrophobic yet? You should. You’re penned in like a rat in a maze, trying to find the physical and psychological space to do your work. And it's not there.

The Obesity Epidemic

dan — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:42:05 -0700

In the beginning, there was the manila folder. And it was good. All your information fit into one compact place. So you put more info into it. And more. And more.

And then it stopped working. Folders bulged like Vegas-era Elvis in a three-piece rhinestone suit. Stuff spilled out. You couldn't find what you were looking for. You bought Pendaflex pocket folders to handle the spillover, but that only posponed the inevitable. Eventually, you were back in the same boat.

It's not just kids with the obesity problem. It's your filing system. It doesn't work.

Here's what to do: separate your working files (the active stuff that you touch daily, or several times a week) from the reference files (the stuff you only look at occasionally).

So you'll make two fiiles for Spacely Sprockets: a working file and a reference file. the working file is in your desk and has only the current contract and papers relating to a recent order. It's easy to access the six pieces of paper (or email or Word docs) that are an issue today.

One -- and only one -- thing at a time, please.

dan — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:32:06 -0700

Repeat after me: multi-tasking doesn't work.

Saturday's New York Times ran an article on the perils of multi-tasking. According to the article, David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, reports that

Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes. Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.

And if you still believe that you're different, that you really can talk on the phone to a customer while writing an email, this is what René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University has to say:

A core limitation [of the human brain] is an inability to concentrate on two things at once.

How much junk do you deal with each day?

dan — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:04:13 -0700

The 2005 McKinsey Global Survey of Business Executives revealed that a staggering amount of time is wasted on emails, voice mails, and meetings with no value. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Bubkes. Take a look at their numbers:

Staggering, aren't they? 55% of respondents are losing between 1/2 and 2 1/2 days per week to stuff that's just not helping them professionally or personally. No wonder they're stressed. And you're probably in the same boat.

So what can you do?

You need to filter out this stuff before it ever hits your inbox, your desk, your calendar. You don' t even want to waste time processing this low-value (or no-value) information before tossing it.

Cogitus Interruptus

dan — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:31:50 -0700

We've all experienced the dreaded cogitus interruptus: you're in the middle of a complicated spreadsheet or a delicately worded proposal or just plain thinking (in the words of Jack Handy) deep thoughts. Just when you're about to have your Eureka! moment, someone taps you on the shoulder or sticks his head into your office and says, "Dan, got a sec? Just a quck question. . . " (which, of course, never is). And just like that, you've lost your train of thought, and with it, the cure for cancer, the recipe for transmuting lead into gold, or the angle for getting the company to pay for your boondoggle of a trip to Paris.

In today's open offices -- and with the near-universal belief in an open door policy -- it's getting increasingly difficult to find time to work without interruptions. What can you do?

Consulting services brought to you by Rodin.

dan — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 20:18:48 -0800

Our friend over at Evolving Excellence, Kevin Meyer, brings to our attention a serious problem for consultants: big brain syndrome. Check it out here: you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll forward it. Promise.

What's all this Lean business?

dan — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:56:21 -0800

WorkLean has nothing to do with Jenny Craig.

Lean is an all-encompassing way of running a company. I use "way" in the sense of "the way of the warrior" or the "way of the Camaroon pygmies." lt's a comprehensive philosophy that guides a company.

Just what the world needs: another blog

dan — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:40:03 -0800

Welcome.

To paraphrase the band Cracker, what the world needs now is another blog, like you need a hole in your head.

So why do it? Well, I'm hoping to disintermediate brick-and-mortar and virtual booksellers and provide value-added content that synergistically reinforces my client coaching. It will create a virtuous circle that allows clients and readers to leverage my insights for paradigm-shifting workplace performance.

Oh, wait. That's so Web 1.0. Never mind.

Let's try that again.

What I'd like to do is provide ideas to readers interested in becoming a little more productive. A little more efficient. A little more protected from the avalance of work that threatens to bury them each day.

Of course, there are other people out there addressing the same issues. Some of them are quite good. I hope to earn your attention through the quality of my ideas and the clarity of my presentation. And maybe along the way I'll make you laugh. That would be nice, too.

An (Im)perfect Mess

dan — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 16:48:44 -0800

The new book, "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder", is creating waves for its unorthodox acceptance -- even approval -- of mess at home and at the office.

But is messiness really beneficial?

I think the authors make an unfair distinction. On the one hand, you have order for order's sake. The authors argue that all those poor fools who arrange their pencils by hardness of lead are in love with order for no valid reason other than aesthetics. Or they're neurotic.

On the other hand, you have chaos in the service of creativity. The authors suggest that messiness enables people to get on with the really important things in their lives, rather than having their sock drawer arranged just right. And the time freed up by embracing chaos allows people to do wonderful things, like connecting two pieces of paper on their desks, and winning a Nobel Prize.