Of all the topics in lean methods and personal productivity, this is where the greatest payoff comes: identifying and removing waste (muda) in our personal work. In this article, we’ll focus on getting the enemy out in the open, and in the next will look at countermeasures.
There is a huge amount of waste in our personal work.[1] How much actual value-adding work are you getting done in a typical day? Most of us in business, especially American business, take pride in the long hours we work, yet how often do we take stock of just how much time is wasted in a typical workday.
Keep in mind that muda is defined as any activity or input that does not add value to the customer. Reducing waste improves our value to the end customer (even if we are our own end customer), and/or lets us spend less time producing that value—so that we can concentrate on having fun.
Lean principles have a long record of accomplishment in manufacturing, and have identified seven traditional sources of muda.[2] While some of these also apply to personal productivity, I think it will be much clearer if we create our own list that applies to personal work rather than try to apply the same definitions. I’ve come up with seven principal sources of waste in daily work—these are my own opinion, so I am sure there is scope for improvement or modification.
Focus: Distractions have to be at the top of this list because there is so much competing you’re your attention at any one time. A survey by salary.com found that the average office worker spends 2.09 hours out of an 8-hour day on non-work related activities such as cruising the internet, socializing. That’s 26% of your time, but in reality, the total percentage of time has to be much higher, because of switching costs: it takes time after even a short distraction to get fully up to speed when you get back on task.
Searching: This is probably the second most important source of muda in personal work. According to Daniel Markovitz in A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance
Prioritization: this is related to insufficient focus, because when you are distracted you are focusing on the wrong priority. Yet it goes beyond distraction; you may be totally focused on something that does not add value. Maybe it’s because something is urgent, and not important. It may be caused by thinking too short-term. (Is it more important to mow the lawn or to plant a tree? That depends on whether your focus is short or long term)
Procrastination: This is related to distraction and prioritization, but it merits its own category because of the reasons behind it. It may be because you find a task to be unpleasant or difficult. It may be simply ingrained habits and routines. The major cost of procrastination, besides merely time wasted, is the possibility of problems festering and growing when they remain unaddressed.
Technique/skill: As someone who spends a significant amount of time banging away at a keyboard, I am woefully inefficient. I’m constantly typing something wrong and going back to fix it. In this paragraph alone, I’ve already had to backspace and fix seven typos. That’s a small example, but I’ll bet if I did a time and motion study, I would find that it adds up to a big chunk of time. On a higher level, As K. Anders Ericsson tells us (the world’s foremost expert on experts), the majority of professionals quickly attain an acceptable, undistinguished level of competence in their field and then level off. How much competence are you leaving on the table?
Knowledge: Not learning enough, or learning too much. In some cases, it’s about incomplete learning. I’m very guilty of this. I read a lot, but if you forget most of what you read, how much of that activity has been wasted? [3]Or how many times have you had a great idea and then forgotten it because you didn’t write it down? On the other hand, you can stuff your head with unnecessary information. There’s no law that says you have to read an entire book cover to cover. Why not skip over the parts that don’t apply to you?
Underutilization: This is the equivalent of throwing away half-squeezed oranges. We also underutilize our own talent and energies. When we don’t plan a sales call or prepare for a meeting, for example, we leave performance on the table. When we don’t delegate, we may be underutilizing the time and skills of other in our network. What about things we own? For example, software—I’ve purchased applications that I’ve not used, or have only used a small subset of the total available features.
This list is obviously incomplete. None of us lack for ingenuity in finding ways to waste our personal productivity. In the next article of this series, we’ll explore countermeasures to these and other sources of personal muda.
[2] Motion, waiting, conveyance, correction, overprocessing, overproduction, inventory.
[3] I can’t claim perfection here. To show how bad I am, there has been more than one occasion where I’ve come across an interesting book on Amazon and decided to buy it, only to have Amazon remind me that I already bought it a few years ago. Sure enough, I’ll discover that I already read the book.
In the first article of this series on applying lean methods to personal work, I wrote about using 5S to clean and organize my workspace. In this article, I will explain my second step: making work visible. Experts in lean methods will probably quibble about the order in which I’m approaching this personal project, but I’m being driven by what I see as my most important priorities, and so far it’s working for me.
To understand why it’s so important to make your work visible, we must first look at some context. In his book A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance
How much of your pending tasks and work-in-process can you actually see? Unlike a factory worker who can see raw materials and half-completed assemblies, most knowledge workers can’t see everything that needs to be worked on. You may have piles of folders or loose papers, sticky notes all over your desk and walls, reminders in Outlook, etc. You may even have a detailed to-do list, but the longer it gets the more difficult it is to spot the priorities, or to distinguish the urgent from the important.
Even worse, people push more and more demands on you, and your work-in-process eventually gets to point where you feel like Lucy in the chocolate factory.
The solution is to develop a pull system, or personal kanban, as described in Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life
How to set up a personal kanban system
These are the steps outlined in PK.[1]
Get your stuff ready: the only ingredients needed for this are a whiteboard, markers, and sticky notes.
Establish your value stream: this one took me several iterations. I eventually divided my work into five value streams: customers (selling and delivering), writing, research and learning, special projects, and personal. Because I already have a sales funnel for my customers and prospects, that did not go on my board. I also kept my personal stuff separate on an existing board. Each of the three remaining value streams went on my board, divided into three principal phases: READY, WORK-IN-PROCESS (WIP), and DONE. As you will note, the WIP phase is further broken down depending on the type of work being done. (Ideally, the best way to establish your value stream is to first define your customer and what is value to your customer but I skipped that step for now.)
Establish your backlog: anyone familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Establish your WIP limit: We pride ourselves on multi-tasking and being busy all the time, but most of us overestimate our ability to get things done. Benson and Barry clearly distinguish between capacity and throughput. Capacity is our theoretical output, based on our pace of work and the time we have available. Since we overestimate our pace and underestimate the time things will take, capacity will never equal throughput. Like a busy highway, pumping in more cars eventually results in gridlock. Everyone’s WIP limit will vary; their estimate is that a good measure of throughput is about 65% of capacity. This allows for the inevitable interruptions, crises, etc. that we omit from our plans.
Begin to pull: Once you have a comfortable amount of work on your board, pull a task out of READY when you have the capacity to do it. This is the stage where you use your judgment to prioritize. When the task is finished, move it to DONE. Ideally, you would work on one task at a time and see it through to completion. That’s not realistic, particularly when you’re dependent on inputs from others, so you can have several different things in WIP at one time.
Reflect: Take advantage of the visibility you get to periodically review your workflow and look for ways to improve it. The first thing that became obvious to me is that I begin too many books or articles at one time, which is one reason a lot of what I read is not absorbed and hence wasted. (Muda, or waste, is the subject of an upcoming article—which you may note from the board above.)
Why it works
Context: There is a certain energy and motivation you get when you can see why you are doing something and how it aligns with the big picture. Related to this is the concept of narrative. Just as information is more meaningful when it’s presented as part of a compelling story, making work visible lets you see the flow of work.
Clarity: Clarity motivates. As Chip and Dan Heath tell us in Switch, “…if you want people to change, you must provide crystal-clear direction.” They also go on to say, “Ambiguity is the enemy. Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.” When you have a pile of unconnected tasks to do, the choices can be overwhelming and they can provide the environment and excuse for procrastination. Making your work visible reduces choices and lays out a clear path to unambiguous goals.
Closure: there’s something very satisfying about physically transferring a sticky note from one phase in the process to another, and to seeing them pile up in the DONE section.
As a side benefit, seeing the flow of work helps you identify activities that don’t add value. By definition, those are waste, which is the topic of the next article in this series.
[1] Note, just going through the 5S process goes a long way toward making work visible. There is a lot of unfinished work lurking in the piles of stuff on your desk and in your office.
