A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance

by Anonymous

Create a customer value map: Identify your downstream customers and the value that they demand from you. Include yourself and your needs in this map. Don’t focus on tasks or inputs; focus on what benefit they need. (You may find it useful actually to ask them what they want.) Complete a time-tracking log for one week.

Taiichi Ohno, one of the fathers of the Toyota production system (yes, back to him again), identified seven kinds of waste2: Correction or defects (e.g., errors in documents) Conveyance (e.g., handoffs, movement of documents—even electronically) Overproduction (e.g., doing work not requested, extra features) Waiting (e.g., waiting for the next step) Processing (e.g., extra steps, approvals, and sign-offs) Motion (e.g., unnecessary motion—looking for things,

making copies) Inventory (e.g., backlog of work—in your inbox, in piles on the floor)

The key is to reduce the variability and complexity of your job by improving the following types of tasks: (1) daily work processes; (2) routine, repetitive work; (3) creative work that can be transformed into routine work.

Applying the “4 Ds” to your work is one part of the answer. (Visual management is another, and is addressed in the next chapter.) When you dive into your paper or electronic inbox, you have to apply one of these 4Ds to each item (eliminating procrastination as a legitimate course of action, of course): Do it: If it can be completed in less than two minutes, do it right then and there. Delegate it: If there’s someone better suited to handle it, because they have more knowledge or time, delegate it. Designate it: If it’s a more complicated and time-consuming issue, schedule time for it in your calendar or task list at a later date. Discard it: If it’s irrelevant or insignificant, discard

From a Lean perspective, procrastination is unacceptable.

So, to improve flow, do the worst thing first. When you arrive at the office, before you check e-mail, before you look at the Oscar fashions—before you take care of whatever you find easy or fun—commit to spending a certain amount of time working on the really difficult or unpleasant stuff that’s hanging over your head.

By dealing with it first, you’ll minimize the overall time required to dispose of the task.

Let legendary management philosopher Peter Drucker have the final word on this subject: To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.11

Parkinson’s law—work expands to fill the time available for its completion—recognizes this unfortunate reality of human nature. And, if you don’t believe it applies to you, think about what I call the vacation paradox: Even though you never seem to be able to get all your work done on a regular day, on the days right before you go on vacation, you somehow manage to crank through all your daily work plus a good chunk of the backlog of stuff that has been moldering on your desk for the past month.

Apply 4Ds to all paper in your inbox. Apply 4Ds to all e-mail messages in your inbox. Make a recurring calendar appointment for 9 a.m. (or whenever you come to work): “Worst First.” Turn off e-mail alerts.19 Make a sign for your door (if you work in an office): “Do Not Disturb Until O’Clock While you are doing other work, keep a notepad next to your computer to record phone calls you want to make or e-mails you want to send. Schedule specific times for processing e-mail. Create a checklist for one of your repetitive processes.

William James, believed that the creation of habits was essential to productivity and efficiency. Habits are, in a sense, nothing more than standard work that has become automatic and reflexive. If you’ll bear with me (and his turgid, 19th-century prose) for just a bit, you’ll see he was actually quite eloquent on the subject: Habit is the flywheel of society, its most precious conserving agent. The great thing, then, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against growing into ways that are disadvantageous as we guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automation, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their proper work. There is no more miserable person than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of deliberation.

Half the time of such a man goes to deciding or regretting matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.1

Conscious thought resides in the prefrontal cortex of our brains, which is, unfortunately, quite limited—it can only process between four and nine variables at a time before becoming overburdened.

Understanding A3 Thinking, Productivity Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2008 by Durward Sobek and Art Smalley, and The A3 Workbook, Productivity Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2010 by Daniel Matthews.