Where Can You Improve Your Processes?

Hopefully, by now, you will have realised turning everything into a project slows you down and is one of the most inefficient ways to get work done. A better way is to find the process for doing your work. Processes are efficient and only require a trigger to get started. With projects, you don’t have a trigger, which leads to meetings and discussions on how to get things started.

With processes, you know the steps before you begin and can anticipate the time it will take to complete them; that gives you the right foundation to complete your work on time every time.

However, once you have established a process for doing your work, a great question to ask yourself is: where can I improve this process? For example, I started creating online courses six years ago. The first course I made was a project. I didn’t know where to start or how to create it. There was a lot of research involved. However, once I had the information, I muddled through and eventually had a course I could publish.

That initial course took a long time, but I wrote down each step. I used those notes to create a checklist when creating my second course. As a result, the second course was easier to produce.

Six years later, when I come to creating a new course, I have a checklist I can follow, which gives me a starting trigger, and I know exactly where I am in the process. That checklist/process has been refined over the years, and I took a leaf out of Japanese companies’ methodology — looking at every point in the process and identifying friction points. For instance, initially, I found it challenging to record individual classes consistently. I soon realised I needed to block two days for recording. When initiating a new course, a part of the process is to block two days in my calendar two weeks after I begin the process.

I like to term this my ‘how can I do it better’ methodology. Every three months or so, I pick an area of work and ask: how can I do it better? This could be how I manage email, collect data or do my exercise (it’s not all about work). This way, I am in a constant and never-ending improvement cycle.

The way to start this is to look at what you do and find the parts of your work you struggle with. Why do you struggle? Is it because of a perceived lack of time? — which usually indicates it lacks priority in your life — or does it always take longer for you to do than you anticipate? It could be you are heavily reliant on other people, which means the outcome is delayed. What can you do to eliminate those delays?

One of the best things about looking for friction points in this way is that it makes even the most mundane parts of your work more interesting. The results often mean you turn something you once disliked doing into something you no longer dislike.

I have a client who is the VP of his company’s factory. He identifies his core workas; employee safety, factory productivity and costs. This client has turned monitoring these areas into a process he completes each morning at work. He begins by reviewing the accident reports and then checks the previous day’s output and the expenditure. Doing this daily takes him no more than twenty minutes because he knows where to get the information. From the information he gets from this process, he can determine his priorities for the day.

Fortunately, accidents involving his team are very rare. Still, if he notices a reduction in output, he knows to speak with the people responsible to see what went wrong and can then, if necessary, develop a solution. Similarly, if costs have gone up, he can investigate and make decisions that will ultimately bring the costs down.

The advantage of using processes is that each time you run the process, you can see where things work and where they don’t. You can also find parts you can eliminate. For example, around a year ago, I realised I no longer needed to track the content I create weekly in Asana. While keeping Asana up-to-date each day took less than ten minutes, eliminating that step saved me over an hour each week.

Today, I track my content publication in my Weekly Planning Matrix and ensure I have sufficient time scheduled each week to create that content.

Most people I speak with cite communications as the biggest drag on their productivity. Email and messages are persistent and part of our work that demands a process. How do you manage your communications? Do you allow messages to interrupt you every time a new one comes in, or have you developed a better way? Allowing messages and emails to interrupt your work is a symptom of FOMO (Fear of missing out) and causes tremendous pain and stress on other parts of your work.

You could use the InBoxZero 2.0 methodology to deal with emails and set some rules of engagement with messages. Rules of engagement are a fantastic way to develop a process for managing Slack and Teams messages. For instance, you could make it a rule to never look at your phone while with a customer or while driving (and when visiting the bathroom — no, seriously, you can do this). Then, once you have finished your meeting or arrived at your destination, you can give yourself five minutes to deal with any messages.

I would advise never to accept the status quo of “my boss expects me to respond immediately”. If you have a boss like that, it’s time to have a conversation with your boss. This is a sign of poor management, and poor managers never last long. However, you can explain your process to your boss, and as long as the reason you do not respond immediately is genuine, any boss would have to agree to your rules of engagement.

What could you do better if you looked at your process for a few minutes? If you want more time for other things and to improve at what you do, perhaps this question is worth asking.

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊

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