Practice Your Personal Kaizen

by Jason Thomas

Image by Juha Nieminen

Click to view A Japanese management strategy called Kaizen roughly translates to

"continuous slow improvement." In the corporate world, it's an efficiency and defect-

proofing system often used on factory floors. But Kaizen emphasizes the well-being of the

employee, working smarter, not harder and developing best practices so that workers don't

have to think. As such, Kaizen is an ideal approach to improve one's personal workflow.

Getting Things Done methods work well within the practice of Kaizen. Kaizen would be the

overall strategy, and GTD a collection of tactics for process improvement. To apply GTD in a

Kaizen way, you might choose a few related ideas from GTD that will help you immediately

in areas where you need the most work. Then you'd implement one tactic every week for a

month. You'd work on that one tactic 43 folders, say for a week, consciously using it and

thinking about it. After a week, you'd have it down to the point where you don't have to think

about it anymore. The next week, you'd move on to the next device while continuing to use

the one you just mastered.

Practice your personal Kaizen http://lifehacker.com/207029/practice-your-personal-kaizen

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That way, you're continually improving your process, painlessly, without having to interrupt

much of your present workflow or take anything new by storm. There's the thing with

Kaizen: you have to stick to it. It doesn't necessarily require a huge amount of discipline

front loaded, but you have to hold on to each small gain you make. Since each step is a small

increment, that's easy enough to do.

To start your own personal Kaizen, sit down and make a list of the areas you want to

improve. If you're not sure where you can make your day more efficient, try timing your

activities during a representative day. You may be surprised at the result you might be

wasting a great deal of time in places that you don't expect. Check out Gina's previously-

featured Time Map for a good way to track where your day goes.

Say you find three areas you can streamline: you spend a lot of time processing email, taking

phone calls interspersed throughout the day, and writing reports.

Say that email is the single greatest source of lost time, disorganization and thrash. You lose

them. You forget to respond to them. Every time you read one or respond to one, you need

several minutes to find where you were in the report that you were writing.

So you should deal with the email problem first. It's fairly easy to tackle, and that's another

idea of Kaizen: to take on the low-hanging fruit first. Then you're getting tangible

benefits right away that will stand you in good stead while you conquer the more difficult

problems later on.

You might introduce a folder flow. You're all email wizards by now, so this is just an

example. You might have an inbox and an urgent box. You set up a filter so that all email

marked urgent go into the urgent box, and all others sit in the inbox. You set aside five

minutes every hour, right before you refill your coffee cup, to deal with the urgent items as

quickly as possible you want that coffee, right? And twice, right before lunch and before

you leave for the day, you clear out the inbox, reading and dealing with all items that weren't

by Gina Trapani


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marked urgent. Easy and simple, with process improvements and

thinking built in.

You want to externalize thinking and book-keeping as much as

possible, and you also want them to happen "for free" as much as

possible, or as artifacts of other tasks. You also want to build in error-

proofing as much as possible. The "urgent" filter is an example: by

clearing the "urgent" box, you know that you haven't missed any urgent

items. By chunking it together into a small piece of time at the end of

every hour, you're cutting down on thrash time, the reorganizing

overhead that happens at the beginning and end of every task when

you're trying to reorient your brain.

Kaizen also focuses on eliminating waste. On the factory floor, this

means wasted movement. Setting up tool stations so that everything is

within arm's reach is an easy way of cutting out wasted steps, and

iterated over the course of a day, or a month, for two hundred workers,

this means greatly increased productivity. It also means less wear and

tear for the workers themselves, and that's good for everyone.

In the office environment, "waste" might refer to wasted brain time.

Hemming and hawing to think of what to do with a given email. Having

to look up from your report every five minutes to answer an "urgent"

email that ends up having to do with someone needing to find a home for

his kitty-cat. Across the course of a day, these little interruptions add up.

Standardization is another Kaizen principle. With standardization,

you think about what "best practices" are, and you do so in advance.

Then you externalize those best practices as much as possible, and you

work those practices so that they become automatic. When

things get hectic, when you have ten things to get done before tea and

they're shelling the trench lines for the third time today, you can just fall

back on your habits and follow the procedures that you decided upon

during a calmer time.

I've been adopting one new practice every month. As I got more and

more freelance writing assignments, I had to set up a folder pipeline to

keep track of that. Folder pipelines include error proofing and memory

aids built in so that you don't need to think about them, and if you

perform the menial Tetris tasks of moving things from folder to folder as


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required, they don't take much thought at all. Seconds

per day, really. Compare that to time spent looking

for documents, deciding if the documents are the

right one and wondering whether you already pitched

a story to a given editor.

A few months back, I started using GTDTiddlyWiki.

It's packed with features, and I've found a number of

them that I like very well really, it's just a canvas on

which you can design your own process

improvements and workflows. I store lots of data

there. I back it up by sending it to my Gmail account.

I'm continually tearing apart my system of hyperlinks

and reconfiguring them in ways that make more

sense, are simpler and easier. It took some time

getting used to it, but that single, free HTML

document ended up being my killer app, and I would

miss it terribly. Now I use it every day, and using it is

unconscious. I don't have to think about what I'm

going to do with a phone number or a contact name. I

don't need to wonder where I wrote that little idea. All

that thinking is inbuilt.

Another month, I started using a Hipster PDA. It was

very quick to get used to. Kind of like crack in that

way. It also solved numerous problems related to

forgetfulness, lost slips of paper and clutter.

Kaizen is a system for introducing process

improvements. But the most important thing is to use

these systems to make your life easier. You can use

them to pump out more work, and that's a good thing,

but remember that the whole purpose is so that you

don't have to work those twelve-hour Fridays.

Organization systems are there to remove

Holy wiki, Batgirl! GTD

TiddlyWiki tracks all your Getting Things

Done lists - Next Actions,


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hair-tearing and nail-biting and

rushed deadlines. They don't have

to become a way of life, like that

guy sitting next to you who

sanitizes his own phone handset

with industrial disinfectant before

and after he's using it, the one who

has different color-coded file totes

for each day of the week. He

worships that stuff. Those totes

aren't just totes, they're totems. It

doesn't have to be that way.

Make your improvements small

and gentle and you'll stick with

them.

Jason Thomas is a writer and

computer professional living in

the Twin Cities.

I practized Kaizen and

internalized it even before I

knew what it was called. I'm

not sure how popular it is,

even tho I've read the

Wikipedia article on it

before.

For me, a large part of

Kaizen is being "agile" (to

cop a buzzword), yet so

gradual and gentle that over

the long-term, I can look

and go, "WOWZA! Look at

all those changes!"

However, with near-focus, it

doesn't seem like a lot is

being done. But each day

really stacks up.

I use Gmail labels for


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prioritizing

and I

realize

that

since I

can't

grab

everything

that's

just

unmanageable

I let

small

stuff

drop and

tackle

the

equivalent

of what

the

above

article

describes

as

"urgent".

Focusing

on better

quality

work and

results

for all.

I also

prefer, if

I can, to

work on

projects

in blocks

of time.

Spending

an entire

day on

just one


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Practice Your Personal Kaizen

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