Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Daily improvement time

I have found that a useful technique for continuous improvement is to take a little time each day to think about it. Have a little down time? Want a change of pace from your usual activities? Take a moment and ask yourself, what needs to be improved?

It's (for me) to identify areas that need improvement. In my daily improvement time I pick one and start working on how to make an improvement. The area needing improvement that I picked yesterday was transferring one set of files to multiple servers. I thought that surely that could be done more efficiently than how I was doing it.

In investigating possible solutions, I had an insight about how to smooth the transition we're planning for this summer for a change in server architecture. It's much more important than the issue I started with and I'm very pleased with having come up with a better solution to a more significant problem.

All because I had a little extra time and wanted a change of pace from my usual work.

I recently wrote about the "daily tweak". These two posts are obviously related. The daily tweak is the goal to make a change every day. Daily improvement time is figuring in how to come up with the tweak. It's a tweak on the daily tweak.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, tweak

Monday, March 19, 2012

The daily tweak

Can you improve something every day? Try it. I'm not talking about a revolutionary change, but just a tweak...but a persistent tweak, an improvement that you'll keep.

As I look over my desk, I see lots of opportunity for improvement. Papers scattered, Post-Its around, pens and USB drives scattered about.

Something else is a bit of a mess: time. I don't do a very good job of spreading long-term tasks over time. I would do better to make bits of progress along the way. David Allen's Getting Things Done is an approach that has a lot of appeal.

So, I've actually made a few tweaks today. I have a daily process list that pops up first thing every morning which I use to plan my day.

• Adjusted my daily process to include a step similar to the 43Folders in Getting Things Done. But instead of using folders, I just make entries on my online calendar (folders? paper? are you kidding?)
• Adjusted my daily process to include a daily tweak
• Realized that I wasn't actually doing the weekly review I have scheduled on my calendar every week, so I wrote a review process.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, tweak