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Tag Archives: labyrinths
What I learned #1: 3 Reasons to Identify Time Wasters
Emailing multiple versions of files.
Telling the staff what to do at closing time.
Remembering the recipe.
Finding your vehicle registration.
How do we build those bridges?
Who’s on the clock?
What does she want for her birthday theme?
We always do the graphic layout that way.
Now I have to call all the staff on shift to tell them that…
Did that campfire get enough wood?Time. Busy, busy, busy. If only we had more time. Time keeps on ticking into the future. Time waits for no man. A stitch in time saves nine. Busy, busy, busy. We all waste time. Sometimes on purpose, but mostly we’re so busy we can’t see that we may be active, but we aren’t being effective. We’re filling every waking moment, but we’re wasting time.
Telling the staff what to do at closing time.
Remembering the recipe.
Finding your vehicle registration.
How do we build those bridges?
Who’s on the clock?
What does she want for her birthday theme?
We always do the graphic layout that way.
Now I have to call all the staff on shift to tell them that…
Did that campfire get enough wood?Time. Busy, busy, busy. If only we had more time. Time keeps on ticking into the future. Time waits for no man. A stitch in time saves nine. Busy, busy, busy. We all waste time. Sometimes on purpose, but mostly we’re so busy we can’t see that we may be active, but we aren’t being effective. We’re filling every waking moment, but we’re wasting time.
I realized that we had some broken systems when this season we grew the business, but found ourselves drowning in work. At one point I realized that we couldn’t get much bigger, unless we got a whole lot better. We had to stop wasting time.
To do this, we began with a meeting between the top staff to discover the tasks, items, calls, questions that were sucking away our productive time. You might call it a “bitch session”, but you have to start somewhere. Generally, even “bitching” is based in some fact, on some real annoyance.
Throughout this process, we discovered a few very interesting reasons why you occasionally have to stop working and look at the way you work.
Here are some reasons why you, too, need to stop working to identify your time wasters.
1. Time is the most valuable asset a business possesses. Your time. Your staff’s time. Your guest’s time. It is incredibly valuable and you are wasting it – needlessly.
2. New time creates opportunities. You increase your business and personal capacity if you eliminate time wasting activities. Time = Opportunity. Notice I said, opportunity, not money. You have the opportunity to eat dinner with your kids. Your staff has the opportunity to do the real work that makes clients happy. Your sales team has the opportunity to make more calls. Your party planner has the time to get things right on the first order. You have to eliminate time wasters or you are handicapping your business and your people.
3. It boosts morale. If you take the time to listen to your employees, coworkers and partners, you may find that they can save your time and you can save their time. Happy employees take good care of your guests. If your people are so busy they can’t think straight, they will make mistakes and your clients will suffer.
We had so many group leaders calling asking the same questions Michelle nearly had a breakdown. She was stuck doing busy work instead of caring for guests. Our system was broken and it wears your staff out.
4. Bonus #1: No offense, but you can’t even see the big time wasters in your business. Time wasters creep in slowly, you have to stop working to see them. Systems get old. Technology gets slow. Employees and owners alike develop systems to cope with the broken process. No one will say, “Hey, here’s a big time waster!” Likely they will soldier on looking very busy indeed.
If you don’t stop working you can’t spot time wasters. Your homework for the week is to hold a meeting and ask your family, management or other top-level people in your organization two simple questions:
“What takes up most of your time?”
and
“What do you feel really wastes your time?”
Have a great week,
Hugh
PS Bonus #2 If you really want to get feedback, have each person right his or her name on 3×5 cards or sticky note and answer the questions above for himself or herself. After they hand the cards in, have them write down the person’s name seated to the right of each of them, and answer the questions for that person.
Post the notes clustered by each person’s name on the wall or white board so everyone can see each person’s internal and external time challenges.
It’s especially interesting to learn what others observe about how we each spend our time.
“Don’t get squashed by yourself.” S.U.M.O. practice for farmers.
…Continuing our series looking at Paul McGee’s S.U.M.O. (Shut Up and Move On) strategies, we’re looking at #3 and #4. If you look back to last week’s #1 and #2, we were working through our individual reactions to any given situation. We are to ask ourselves, “Where is this issue on a scale of 1-10 and 10 = DEATH? and How important will this be to me in 6 months time?
Both those questions zoomed out our perspective and worked to frame the issue appropriately using a long time scale. The real power in S.U.M.O. comes, I feel, from McGee’s next two questions because they are designed to engage you on a personal level.
#3 Is my response appropriate and effective? We all want people to do what we want them to do. The trouble is, we have no control over their actions and reactions. Tough as it is to accept, we can only control ourselves.
Here’s a chart of Appropriate/Inappropriate, Effective/Ineffective to illustrate the concept that we can only control our personal actions.
Think of a time when you have experienced each of these potential outcomes to your actions or reactions. Using the abbreviations, I’ve provided a few examples.
- A/E: You see an employee doing a great job with a customer. You encourage the employee and praise her publicly. She continues to improve and turns into one of your star employees, helping others along the way. This was Appropriate and Effective.
- IA/E: You scream at a vendor and they rush to fulfill your request. It gets done, but the relationship is never the same. It was effective, temporarily, but not an appropriate response.
- A/IE: You politely request for the third time that your young employee come in on time. Sure, you kept your tone appropriate, but it will likely not modify the employees behavior.
- IA/IE: Your wife fails to notify you that the in-laws are coming for the weekend. You flip out, curse their names, slam the door and shatter the glass on a cold December night. Riiiight, you get the picture you are WAY inappropriate and COMPLETELY ineffective…. and now you are cold, out some money for a window, still spending the weekend with your in-laws, only you’ll be sleeping on the couch to boot!
Don’t get squashed by yourself. The key is that YOU are in complete control of your response. It may not always feel like it, but taking just a moment to consider your words and actions can save you from being IA or IE and maybe even M.I.A. (as I would be if I ever tried to pull that last trick with my wife 🙂 Don’t squash yourself with IA/IE responses you may regret later. Focus on improving the situation.
#4 How can I influence or improve the situation? After identifying the type of response you plan to give, you need to choose your words and actions. #4 focuses your energy on “influence and improvement.”
Have you ever seen people “pile on”? Kids are famous for it, but I’ve seen adults do it, too. Someone starts complaining about “Bobby”. Then, anyone within earshot comes in to “throw another jab”, “remember another time” when Bobby failed, and before long “everyone hates Bobby.” How could you approach this situation with a focus on improvement?
If you find your kids arguing, do you pile on the complaints? Send everyone away? Add your own yelling? How can you focus your reaction to the situation on improvement.
This week, take the next two steps and personalize your reaction to situations by (#3) identifying the appropriateness and effectiveness of your reactions, then (#4) focusing on how you can influence and improve the situation in a positive way. We’ll finish the series next time, until then, have a great week as you practice your S.U.M.O.!
-Hugh
“S.U.M.O.” Farmers? Part 1 of 3
Paul McGee says, He has a very pragmatic approach to dealing with customer situations, management issues and daily interactions I just love. Over the past few years he has expanded his program to be taught in schools to kids to Stop, Understand and Move On. I’ll do my best to explain how to apply his philosophy to your life in 3 sessions. If you like the blog posts, I really suggest the buying his book here.
1. Where is this issue on a scale of 1-10? McGee adds, “And 10 is death!” What he’s doing is reframing the issue in a broader perspective. Perspective shift, or time shift is a way to look at the issue that might be smacking you in the face right now and “shifting” that issue into it’s future historical context.
Let’s say that your son doesn’t return the gas can full. You go for gas, no gas. You get mad and begin yelling. He starts yelling. Bad situation.
S.U.M.O. strategy: Call a time out. Rate the issue in your head knowing that a “10” equals death. Gas can is likely a 4 or less. Restart the conversation explaining what just happened in your head to your son.
Hugh’s example: Back when I was engaged to my lovely bride, we went to pick out silverware. I love cool unique stuff. Janine likes clean classic lines. After exhorting the awesomeness of the “natural twig sculpted handles” for something like an hour, I realized that on a scale of 1-10, silverware was not something important to me. It was more like a “1”. As I was already getting hungry, I just wanted to eat and I’d use a gardening shovel if I had to.
2. How will I feel about this in six months? This is the second reframing question and it’s a great one. I find myself using this with the kids as they get into petty bickering and nit-picking each other. I like to make them tell my how they are going to remember the specific things they are arguing about in six months.
I like questions such as, “Tell me Ian, which part of what you are saying right now to your sister would you like to have me remind you of in December? Which part of this conversation is so important we should write it down and post on the walls in your rooms? (I love that one:-).
Just making them stop to try to choose the important parts, puts an end to the momentum of the fight.
So, just using these first two strategies, how can you change the way you are currently interacting with an employee or how can you use these in making decisions in your life?
Here’s one more to start your thinking: “You know what, babe, I’d rather spend more of our time together at any restaurant than arguing about which one.”
I know it’s simple, but the best ideas are. Let me know how it works for you and stay tuned for next week’s edition.
Have a great week,
Hugh
“What would it take to make you happy?”
Norman Vincent Peale
Happiness. Chased forever by so many people, but why is happiness so elusive? What would it take to make you happy? Many of us would list “success” in one form or another as the method to achieve happiness. Shawn Achor says that “Happiness is achieved first, then success will come.” Norman Vincent Peale’s quote above gives us the instant power to choose happiness each day.
Three steps to happiness.
1. Don’t wait for it. You might as well choose to be happy now because you’ll never have enough money to be happy. Studies have shown that at ANY income level, the interviewed people believed that true wealth and happiness was double their current income. It didn’t matter if you were making $40,000 or $400,000 dollars, happiness lay just beyond your reach.
2. Don’t discount the power of choice. As trap in your circumstances as you believe you are, you always have a choice. Our lives are so comfortable that we strive to eliminate all pain from our lives. I believe people have become so incredibly weak spirited because they are not forced to experience pain as often as they should. Eric Thomas says, “Pain is temporary. You ain’t gonna die because you experience a little pain. On the other side of pain is success.” Your choices might cause a little pain, but you always have a choice.
3. Don’t overlook your joy. The older my kids get the more I realize that I don’t need to go anywhere special, buy anything expensive, eat fancy food, sell 10 more attractions; I just want to get home earlier and read a book about clay dragons coming to life with my son or play my trumpet with my daughter playing her clarinet. Are you overlooking joy that is already in your life?
What if it’s not as complicated as we make it out to be? What if happiness is closer than we ever imagined? What if it’s already inside us just waiting to be unleashed into the rest of our lives?
Here’s your challenge of the week: As you plant that tree, sell that flower, plow that field, make that sale, I challenge you to take a few seconds to live in that moment of joy, of victory, of happiness and really enjoy it. You can then get back to work, but don’t let the chance to enjoy that little slice of happiness slip away.
Have a great week,
Hugh
PS It was in about 9th grade when I found a personal development tape set in my mom’s personal library of tapes from Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking called “Which face will you put on today?” My 2nd challenge for you is, Can you get something like this into the hands of a teenager or young person? It literally changed my life for the better and you better believe that my kids are going to hear it, too.
Dad out the door.
When my dad was about 6 years old, he went out the door.
The “potato cellar” was a large barn with three floors and a basement- the cellar. Paul, my dad was on the top floor with his monther, my grandmother, called tohim, “Paul, get away from that door.”
Paul replied, “Don’t worry mom, it’s locked! Seeeeeeeeeeeeee…” And with that, he promptly fell out of the barn. In the picture below, you can see the door still attached to the barn, right before we pulled it down.
Paul was fine, though he received a concussion and I would imagine a fairly torough talking to from his mother. 
Dad out the door.
When my dad was about 6 years old, he went out the door.
The “potato cellar” was a large barn with three floors and a basement- the cellar. Paul, my dad was on the top floor with his monther, my grandmother, called tohim, “Paul, get away from that door.”
Paul replied, “Don’t worry mom, it’s locked! Seeeeeeeeeeeeee…” And with that, he promptly fell out of the barn. In the picture below, you can see the door still attached to the barn, right before we pulled it down.
Paul was fine, though he received a concussion and I would imagine a fairly torough talking to from his mother.
How to make a corn maze better.
You just can’t stay the same. If you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind.
Tough words to hear, but true none the less. We run a successful agritourism operation on our home farm. We’ve been going 13 years and every year, guests ask, “What’s new?”
It is this insatiable desire for ‘newness’ that drives Designer Dave and me (Hugh) to create ever more games and puzzles for mazes.
You don’t have to use our stuff, just make sure you are working hard to make your stuff better each season.
What’s your plan for answering “What’s new?” this year. Drop a line via email or phone. We’ll be glad to talk about it with you.
More to come…
