Sense, Statistics and Productivity…
Years ago I worked on a project where the aim was to streamline a department (that’s a euphemism if ever I heard one) and as part of that work I did a Time and Motion study on the all the existing employees/roles – I mapped these and worked out which people had spare capacity, which were over stretched and which roles could be amalgamated. It was a huge piece of work and I actually quite enjoyed the mathematics of it… if not the outcome of the work.
Why on earth am I telling you this? Well recently I have ended contracts with a couple of clients and onboarded several more, I am busy all the time and I am lucky in that I can be flexible and if I want to take a weekday off I can make up the time on the weekend or in the evenings. As a business owner and someone who is incredibly committed and hardworking I’m not worried about getting everything done because I know I can do it. However, I am constantly running around and fire fighting on top of an ever-growing list of repeating weekly tasks and project work that I’ve committed to. It occurred to me that it was about time I did my own Time and Motion study on Spinning Plates to see where I could find efficiencies and streamline my processes.
What is Time and Motion Study? In the old days it was as I said earlier, an investigation into how hard or how fast people were working with a view to improving things or cutting roles. However, it is more about making the work easier and quicker and about finding better and more consistent methods of doing things, being better organised and generally benefitting your business and workload all round.
It sounds like the sort of thing only big businesses do but it’s actually not the case and it’s a great example of how taking time out to work on your business instead of in it can have a massively beneficial impact on your own workload and time management.
Productivity is linked to time and motion. Excessive motion is a waste of time, it’s more tiring and it adds cost.
The smaller the business the easier this is to do but the essence of what you need to for this is a complete review of every task you undertake:
· Think about how long it takes you - is it a one off or a reoccurring task?
· Think about why you’re doing it – is it because it’s how you’ve always done it, is there a better way?
· Think about what you enjoy doing and what you put off – are there patterns to this with client or types of work?
· Think about the systems you use – are you doing this the quickest way or is there a more efficient system that may cost money but save you time and effort?
· Think about who you are doing things for – are some tasks ones you’ve invented yourself but that the client doesn’t actually need or is everything you do necessary?
· Think about your downtime – do you build in breaks, do you build in flex and how do you manage curveballs?
· Think about your time management – how do you make sure everything gets done, how do you keep on top of things, are you missing things or letting stuff fall through the cracks?
· Think about communication – How do clients communicate with you and what’s your turnaround, are you over committing yourself or wasting time in meetings?
Get it all out and all down on paper so that you can really understand how you spend your time and as you answer each question at each stage of the process you’ll naturally find efficiencies and savings that can be made – different ways of doing things.
It’s something I’ve committed to doing more regularly and it’s something I’m going to go into in a bit more depth in some subsequent blogs – so keep an eye out for those as I look into each of the points about and share examples of what I found in my business (and how I changed things) which I hope will inspire you to do your own review, making changes that will benefit you and your business.