Making Time
Recently I took up and delivered on an assignment that was completely out of my comfort zone and not within my ‘assigned’ job responsibilities. It involved web application development that I had very little background in and I got to learn a brand new skill while delivering the final output. I am always fascinated by automating simple manual business tasks by transforming them digitally, and this was my another attempt to make that happen. Learning new things was definitely rewarding, and I was immensely satisfied when I saw the final result.
However, when I took upon the assignment, many of my friends and teammates expressed a concern over whether I was going to find time to deliver it. I already had too much on my plate, so would it be a good idea to take up new work? That too something I was absolutely not responsible for, however, was very much needed to be done. I ended up disagreeing with everyone because I sincerely believed I could make time. And I certainly did.
This is not an anomaly. I regularly follow my passion for making movies, creating podcasts while maintaining a full time job. I confidently can do both, and have been able to deliver results with consistently high quality at both ends. There is a simple principle I follow to make time, and that is called “standardization”.
Standardization of routine tasks is not new. It is one of the core principles of lean manufacturing. In order to continuously improve, you need to be able to create an environment where problems surface and are visible. That can be done with standardization of manual tasks in a process, where anything that is abnormal (that does not fit in the standard) stands out, and can immediately draw your attention. I try to follow this in almost every single (personal and professional) thing I do on a daily basis. However, I do this to not only make problems visible, but also to make time for other activities that I want to accommodate in my time.
Let me illustrate this with a simple example of standardization I have implemented in the past. One of the responsibilities I had in one of my previous jobs was to maintain a photo record of whoever visited our facility for a tour. The steps of the process were,
Knowing when to take a photo of the group
Taking the photo
Getting the names of people and the company they are visiting from
Adding names of the people on the photo
Sending the photo for printing and hanging
Initially when I started this, everything was very manual. The email invite used to come to me from the executive assistant to take the photo, then I used to take the photo manually, then I used to email the PR person with the photo attached to know the names of the people in the photo. Once I got the response, I used to copy-paste the names in photoshop on the top of the photo and then save the photo and email it to the maintenance group for printing and hanging.
For standardizing the process, I created templates for each step mentioned above. For instance, for the email asking the names of the photo, I created an email template that already had the subject line and recipient emails saved. The body of the email had standard instructions on how I want the names to be emailed back to me. That way when I copy paste the names in photoshop, I did not have to worry about punctuation or correct spelling of names. Just highlight the text in the email, copy and paste in the photoshop. It made the process easier and faster, and the time for sending the email was reduced from 30 seconds to about 5 seconds. (A continuous improvement activity on top of this standardized process would be when visitors sign in into the reception kiosk, the names get automatically emailed to me. That way we eliminate the human step of the PR person writing email with names and sending it to me.) In this way, by reducing time for each step by doing a similar standardization exercise, the collective time saved would be significant and free up my time for any other learning exercise or other problem solving. I have several examples of such standardization in my personal (making a breakfast), professional (managing a business program) and creative life (analyzing and processing data from a text based film screenplay, to know more about this, listen to this podcast episode from my podcast, The DNA Story).
I would like to mention the thinking process behind standardization. I think one of the key elements to make this happen is to always think in terms of scaling up. If you are doing something, just think that if I have to do this repeatedly 100 times a day, how I would do it. Right away it gets you thinking how to automate and standardize what you are doing. You can easily break down the process into small steps, some of them could be automated and some have to be done manually.
Once you know what steps can be automated, then it is important to select a tool that you can leverage to automate the steps. When it comes to tool selection, I always try to think in terms of being ‘device independent’. In other words, I do not want to use a software that is installed on a particular machine/laptop. If I do that, then I am bound to use that laptop. If something were to happen to that laptop, then I am stuck. I try to find cloud-based solutions, where with an internet connection and browser on any machine, I can access the tool. For example, if some of my steps require using a spreadsheet, I would choose google sheets rather than excel. For my podcasts, I record directly in a web-based tool rather than using a specific software installed on a specific machine.
One of the greatest benefits of standardization is it allows me to be intuitive about things I really care about. For example, in the example I mentioned above, I deeply care about the fonts, their size, drop shadow of the text, and the background gradient added for contrast in photoshop. I want to spend more creative time on that rather than thinking of adding a comma, or misspelling a name. Standardizing everything before I reach that point allows me to spend more time on these creative decisions. I try to standardize processes to an extent where I can let my intuition take over. I call it the ‘Intuition Threshold’. More on this in a later article.
Standardize. Easiest way to make time in no time. :)
Would love to know your thoughts.
