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Workplace efficiency

10/2/2016

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 Want to make life easier at work? Want to free up time so you can knock out the things that worry you so you can make work less stressful?

 You have to take time to make things better. Do you have one of those jobs where you feel like you have more and more demands to the point you need to bring work home to keep up? Many times we take on a number of tasks at once and feel overwhelmed. About a year ago I put some thought into how I would make my work life more enjoyable so the workload was not so unbearable. I used some of the 5S techniques of sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain. It helped but there was more work to be done. Things where organized and that helped but I still needed more. So what helped?
 I started taking 10 minutes a day to do anything I thought would make myself more efficient. Like printing out the next day’s meeting materials, making a list of things I didn’t want to forget and organizing any supplies I needed for tomorrows meetings. The important thing is I was taking out time for myself to make things better. In essence it was advanced planning and it had a cascading effect when I did it every day the effects where magnified. Each day I found myself working on something different than the day before to make myself even better or add quality to work such as writing thank you cards, or adding additional touches to make work life better for everyone. 

Make a quick list or edit your calendar the day before so you know what’s on the books and can build a mental strategy.
Go digital – I had a file cabinet 5 feet tall, 24 inched deep, and 48 inches wide. Why? I felt in customer interactions I would need them again because many were tied to projects and activities I had done over the last 3 to 4 years. I started scanning in the documents that had signatures or drawn diagrams etc. and shredding the remainder. In this day and age everything should be digital and backed up to another source if you are worried about loss. The benefits of getting rid of the paper where many. I gained about 8 square feet of office space, I gained efficiency because if a client, colleague, or I needed a paper I had to find it, I was helping the environment by no longer printing so many materials.

Another efficiency maker was email. I had rules, I had auto delete, and I got rid of junk mail but the email box became a 08:00 to 4:30 job. Why? Because we let it, society has become email driven in the workplace and we make a job out of drafting emails and making attachments. It’s a common work language. You have to take charge of it and I used a tip from Tim Ferris, Author of the Four Hour Work Week. I checked just the ones I needed info from to start the day then I dispositioned email at 12:00 and 3:30. I no longer spent all day at my email box. I went out and got the things done that needed to be done and were probably going to wind up in my email box anyway. Half of the time I had already done something someone had emailed about.
 
For me taking 10 minutes a day, going digital, using 5S and managing email instead of it managing me turned out to make great improvements in my work life, I hope it helps you too.
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Efficiency

8/21/2016

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Amusement Parks and Queuing Theory

As summer winds down we were recently trying to get the most out of our last few sunny days at a local theme park. We have season passes so we visit at a number of different hours of the day and days of the week. There are days when lines are short and days when they are long. The lines seem even longer on the days where it is sunny and 98 with high humidity. We usually skip those days.
Anyway, we have a number of rides each of us likes. One of the favorites is the bumper cars. On this day the line was shorter than average but still moving slow. As I looked out into the bumper car track I noticed 2 cars were not working and pushed into a corner and still in another corner was yet another car. I thought to myself “how can you have 3 cars out of service” especially 3 out of 12. That’s 25% wow.

Then I thought of how much longer it takes to reduce the length of the line with the broken cars. I noticed this once before at the park when we were waiting for the old time rumble seat cars that follow a track. It seemed like such a long time before the next car came. We “wait” for hundreds of hours per week in our daily lives. Think of how many total hours you spend in a year at traffic lights.
A calculation for the wait time for a theme park attraction is the number of people in line during an hour minus the attraction's hourly capacity. Then you take that number and divide it by the hourly capacity. Then multiply that result by 60 (for minutes in an hour). The result is the average wait time during that hour. So let’s look at the example above using 75 people in line to see what the difference would be.

All cars working:
75 people - 144 (hourly capacity) = (-69)/144 =.47 x 60 = 28.2 minutes
Hourly capacity is 12 cars X a 5 minute turn around which equals 12 rides per hour or 144 capacity.

3 cars broken:
75 people - 84 (hourly capacity) = (-69)/84 =.82 x 60 = 49.2 minutes
Capacity is 9 cars X 5 minute turn around which equals 7 rides per hour or 84 rides per hour capacity.
 
Got a favorite ride at an amusement park? Check out the wait times at queue times.com

https://queue-times.com/

What do you spending time waiting for most in life?


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    Author

    Robert Kent Six Sigma Black Belt and improvement professional

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