I will be perfectly open about the ulterior purpose of this blog post: I’m cheating a little bit so that I can maintain my streak of writing a blog post every work day.
In the interests of strengthening my writing habit and to pump up my presence in social media, I last month resolved to make a big leap from 1-2 blog posts a week to 5, or one every work day. So far, this is my 23rd in a row—but it has not come easy.
The common wisdom is that it takes seven days to make a habit permanent. I’ve never found this to be true for myself. To me, the two most crucial times for a habit are the first day and the fourth week. The first day is critical because you have to start some time. How many times have you procrastinated on starting something you really wanted to do, to the point that you never got started at all? Once I start, initial enthusiasm easily carries me through the first seven days and beyond.
If that enthusiasm can carry you all the way to the point where your new activity is solidly entrenched as a habit, you’ve got it made. But old ways die hard, and enthusiasm may run out before habit kicks in. Sometimes you have to find a way to straddle that gap, and that’s where cheating comes in. By cheating, I mean doing the minimum that technically meets your goal. Let’s say you’ve decided to exercise every day, but maybe you’re under the weather and don’t feel like dragging yourself to the gym: why not do a set of push-ups or sit-ups at home? It will only take a minute or two, and it’s only a small fraction of a full workout, but it’s an infinite multiple of nothing.
Sometimes, you might even find that the little bit you do is enough to overcome inertia and then you keep going. That’s actually what has happened with this post. I thought of the topic this morning only after this sequence of steps:
- I have no idea what to write about today.
- I go through my list of ideas that I’ve stored, but find all kinds of reasons against each one.
- I think it may not be so bad to miss a day; maybe it was a dumb idea anyway.
- I remember that I use the cheating trick with my workouts, and try to decide how I can apply it here.
- I’m not quite sure how this ties in to persuasive communication, sales, or clear thinking, but I figure it’s close enough.
- I begin this article, hoping I can get out a paragraph or two.
- Once I get this far, I’m actually starting to get into it, so I start digging a little further…
Charles Duhigg, in his excellent book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
I wrote previously about personal kaizen, and it’s great to constantly improve a little every day. But some days it’s victory enough not to regress, even if you have to cheat a little to win. Of course, I’m not advocating cheating every time, because all that will instill is a habit of mediocrity. But keep in mind that you can’t win the game unless you’re in it.
They had an amazing ability to multiply
“Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.” John Wooden
Years ago, my kids and my wife got into the beanie baby craze. These were small teddy bears that came in hundreds of varieties. Each cost only a few dollars, so from my point of view it was a great gift. The problem is that they were so cheap that my wife thought nothing of buying one—no single purchase was painful. But over the months the purchases continued; by the time I started looking into it, we figured out that they had spent over $800 in teddy bears!
The beanie baby incident was a reminder of how small things can add up very quickly, and great transformations can happen through tiny changes patiently accumulated. That’s the central idea behind kaizen, the strategy of continuous improvement that is one of the core principles of lean thinking. It works as well in personal productivity as it does on the factory floor.
Kaizen works mathematically not only because things add up, but because of the magic of compounding. A small percentage improvement continuously applied over time means that each successive improvement is larger than the last, and that can make a huge difference over time.
But kaizen also works because of the psychological mechanism. While we’re often exhorted to set big goals for ourselves, the size of the goals can sometimes be self-defeating. Big goals can stress us out; they engage our mind’s self-defense mechanism and engender fear. How many times have you set yourself a big goal—say, a new year’s resolution—and had it fail? Kaizen can help melt resistance.
Besides improving ongoing efforts, kaizen can help you get started on things that you’ve been putting off. One reason we procrastinate on large goals is that their very difficulty can generate fear. We know it will take a large effort, so we put it off until we think we can be in a position to succeed. But often that time never comes. It’s better to take some small steps today that move us a tiny bit closer, than never to take the big steps that will get us a lot closer. There’s a wonderful quote from a mindfulness coach in One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way
Kaizen isn’t just a practice—it’s also a mindset. It’s having the attitude that your performance is not limited by fixed abilities and traits but rather is under your control. It’s about creative dissatisfaction: knowing that it is always possible to improve a process. Finally, it’s about being mindful of what you’re doing and why that opens your eyes to improvement possibilities.
Here are some small steps you can begin taking now to start implementing kaizen:
Choose an area to apply it. Kaizen can be applied to specific areas of your personal life and work, such as fitness, relationships, or learning a particular topic. It may also be applied to the way you work, such as implementing some of the ideas in this series. For example, you can make small improvements in the length of dedicated focused time you spend on a project. 5S is also a great area for applying kaizen. Although it’s a great idea to start with a blitz to begin sorting, setting in order, etc., you may not be able to get to it all at once. So, take a little time each day or each week to chip away at some areas.
Every day a little up. The header of this paragraph is a nice little phrase from The Remedy: Bringing Lean Thinking Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization
Set your goals lower. If you don’t have the time right now for the big goal, break it down into smaller parts and choose those.
Big changes can be OK, too. Although so far the focus has been on small changes, there is definitely nothing wrong with big breakthrough or radical transformations if you happen to think of them and have the motivation to pursue them. In fact, you can combine the two approaches. Just as companies will have dedicated kaizen events, in which they will bring together people for three days to brainstorm improvement ideas, you may occasionally pick an area you would like to improve and then take some time to think about the processes and jot down ideas.
Copy and improve. A friend of mine likes to brag that he uses the CASE method: “Copy and steal extensively.” No one has a corner on good ideas, and we can always learn from what others are doing. But blind copying isn’t enough; what worked for them might work differently in our own situation, so we should try to improve their practices and ideas. The Japanese have a word for it: yokoten.
Just remember, even though perfection may be impossible, perfecting is something you can do every day.
Let’s walk down and do them all
My high school swim coach used to love to tell the story of the old bull and the young bull, standing on a hill overlooking a herd of cows. The young bull says, “Let’s run down there and (do) one of those cows.” The old bull replied, “Let’s walk down there and (do) them all.”
I mention this in this series because so far the implication has been that using lean principles to improve personal work means getting more work done faster. So, when we strive to improve personal productivity, it’s tempting to try to pick up the pace of our work. Common sense tells me that if I want to drive from Point A to Point B, I can save time by going faster. But constantly changing from lane to lane to try to get a momentary advantage may actually slow me down, not to mention that my speed may cause me to be pulled over by the police or cause an accident. By trying to do too much, we run the risk of exceeding natural speed limits that exist for good reasons.
In weapons training, you’re constantly reminded that “slow is smooth; smooth is fast.” This speaks to the importance of flow, which brings us to the connection with lean principles. It is the idea of lining up all steps in the value stream so that they get done in a steady continuous flow with no wasted motions or interruptions. The steps taken to improve flow: focusing on the actual object being worked on (make work visible), removing impediments and rethinking work practices, all take time to implement, but the effort can cut work times in half, according to Womack and Jones in Lean Thinking
There are limitless ways of taking time before, during and after your work to improve outputs and ultimately speed up cycle times. Here are just a few examples:
Five whys: When we encounter a problem, we want to solve it as quickly as possible so we can keep going on with our work. But if we treat the symptom and don’t get rid of the root cause, we are likely to have to repeatedly solve it. The Toyota technique of asking why five times (the number is not hard and fat) adds time to the process but forces you to think at a much deeper level and may help you uncover and address the root cause, which saves a lot of time (among other things) in the long run.
Thinking slow: I’ve written here before about the two modes of thinking we all use, popularized by Daniel Kahneman as fast, intuitive, System 1 thinking; and slow, rational System 2 thinking. Most times intuition and instant recognition of what to do serves us well, but we’re all subject to built-in biases which can lead us astray. The trick is to know when to slow down and apply careful, deliberate thinking to the problem or task at hand. It becomes particularly important in a fast-changing environment, because we’re more likely to encounter situations that are different from anything we’ve seen before.
For creativity, start fast and end slow: In my own experience, whether writing an article or completing a sales call plan, there’s a tremendous benefit in doing a first draft early and then putting it aside. Flashes of insight seem to come instantly, but actually slowing down can help here as well. Somehow the flashes seem to come much easier when they’ve been incubating in my subconscious for a while. It’s especially helpful in crafting and rehearsing an important presentation; taking the time to space out the rehearsals will spark many more improvement ideas.
Preparation: Investing time upfront in preparation is one of the best ways that slowing down can help you finish faster—and better. That’s no newsflash to anyone reading this, so I won’t waste keystrokes with the usual examples. What is amazing, however, is that preparation can improve outcomes even in situations that would seem to allow no time at all for it, such as in superfast sports activities like returning a serve in tennis or hitting a baseball. Frank Partnoy in his book Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
Delay and persuasion: Since a big part of getting things done is getting others to do what you want done, this precept applies to persuasion as well. In persuasion, we often find that trying to convince someone before they are ready can be counterproductive. Sometimes by slowing down selling you can speed up buying, and vice versa. A buyer who feels rushed may react or shut down entirely. New ideas often take time to gain acceptance. When you’re trying to sell ideas internally, it can be tempting to go straight to the top and get a decision forced on the organization, but good luck implementing it. In negotiations, impatience and hurry can be your biggest liability. As long as time is on your side, you don’t have to accept a bad deal.
The previous article in this series about applying lean principles to improve personal work identified seven principal sources of muda (waste) that limit our ability to produce value-adding work. In this post we’ll look at some general principles and specific countermeasures to these.
The list of ways to reduce waste is potentially limitless, and what works for one might not work for another. For that reason, we’ll keep this at a fairly high level, and only bring it down to specifics to illustrate each principle. The five principles that I’ve distilled from my reading and which I have found work well for me are:
