Tag: productivity

What is your ‘battle rhythm’?

I think a lot about “adding value” and sustainability in my business.

image from pixabay
image from pixabay

I try very hard to not take on new tasks that I can’t maintain (a hard, hard lesson to learn).

There are a couple questions I have learned over time to ask myself as I start down the path of any new process/task/venture.

  1. Does the task add value?
  2. Does it cost more than the value it adds?
  3. Is the task sustainable?
  4. Am I reacting to a problem or am I proactively preventing a problem?

What would you add to this list?

I call my list of minimum, mandatory daily processes my ‘battle rhythm’ (I can’t shake 20 years of being in the military). These are processes/actions I feel maintain, sustain and grow my business.

Is such a practice necessary? I think so. Effective, value added habits are necessary to build your platform.

You may be asking, “Where do I even start with this?” Let’s start by having you keep a log of your actions for the next work week. Change nothing, just do what you do, only keep a diary of it. At the end of the week, take a couple of hours and look at this diary.

Some questions you could ask at the end of this period of time:

What did you do that added value?

What could you delegate?

What should you eliminate?

If it adds value, how can you maintain it? If it doesn’t, can you eliminate or delegate the task?

Why “10th Human?”

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image from pixabay

One of my favorite questions is, “Why?”

Why are we doing it this way? is an incredibly powerful question.

I started 10th Human Consulting, LLC, with the concept of the tenth man rule.

The tenth man rule is the concept of having someone on your team who challenges the traditional way of doing things. Someone who, as a standard practice, asks why and proposes alternatives.

This is often viewed as contrarian but it need not be viewed as negative. Instead, it can be a sound part of effective strategy building.

Let’s look at one example of how I saved one organization three weeks a year by asking why and following through on the answer.

Some time ago, I observed a routine in a department tasked with tracking the status of more than 1,200 pieces equipment and directing maintenance for any outages.

The vast majority of that equipment functioned properly day in and day out and the key thing the team needed to know was if was if a piece of equipment was faltering and needed attention. Yet each morning an employee spent approximately 30 minutes entering status updates on every piece of equipment into a computer system.

The status of most equipment didn’t change and only any status that did change needed to be flagged for action. Yet the organization was paying someone 2.5 hours a week – that’s 130 hours a year — to click a mouse more than 1,200 times to confirm statuses that had not changed.

Looking only for status reports that had changed however took approximately two minutes each morning, which saved labor hours and shortened the response time for assignment of maintenance work.

When I saw this, I asked, “Why? Why are you updating statuses that haven’t changed?”

The answer was, “It’s always been this way.”

So I asked, “Where does that data go?” then spent about 30 minutes posing the same question to leaders in higher levels in the organization, until the fellow at Level #3 asked me, “Why the heck are they doing that?”

By having a 10th Man take a fresh look at old practices, the organization freed up approximately $1,950 per year in labor costs*  and was able to channel those new-found hours into value-added activities.

If this resonates with you, please give me a call at 719-440-6626 and let’s chat.

(*Based on $15 per hour, the approximate labor rate for the organization.)