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In 2 days, tomorrow will be yesterday.

I told my family and friends about downsizing all my clothes, shoes, etc. and have started an avalanche of Spring Downsizing. One friend even tried to give me about 20 pairs of pants and 30 blouses she felt were too good to give to charity! Aw, go ahead and give it away... 

Deliberate, intentional, strategic work is the Big Mama of improvement. With focused intent on improving, your progress is so much faster.

Nobody likes to fail. But what separates the masters from the mediocre is their attitude towards failure. You need an awareness of what is not working to get better. What needs improvement? What do I need to reach mastery. To cultivate a good crop, you need a bit of manure!

Reboot and rally

Instead of thinking “The path is full of obstacles”, think “The obstacle is the path”. The master has failed more than the beginner has even tried. Mistakes are learning opportunities so don’t flail yourself for experiencing them.

Strategic practice is based on the idea that we have to relate tactics to strategy and strategic goals. The difficulty with this common sense idea is that it isn’t easy to know how to align immediate work with long-term goals, and there are many barriers to doing so. What kinds of choices must we make in order to be effective in the short-term and at the same time take on this challenge?

Life is usually filled with opportunities to improve. Working to constantly improve is the number one way in which many increase their quality of life.  You try to reduce wasted time and effort, increase effectiveness, identify inefficiencies, streamline your work, intensify your regeneration times, enjoy your progress. Yet never sacrifice quality in favor of doing things faster or cheaper.

For people who are unable to practice continuous improvement throughout their day-to-day work, the next best way to leverage the concept is to hold continuous improvement “events” every quarter. Sit down with your favorite hot beverage and brainstorm. Write your to-do items on post-its and stick them on your kanban board.

How to Practice Continuous Improvement in Companies

Source: https://leankit.com/learn/kanban/continuous-improvement/

Practicing continuous improvement begins with identifying a current process, procedure, workflow or project. Fully understanding what you have to work with is the first step in improvement. This may seem obvious, but many companies that skip this step spend lots of time trying to fix a process only to discover that the process in question isn’t needed, or the process is so poorly integrated with the company that they must take a larger step backwards to look at the bigger picture.

Questions to ask when considering an area for improvement:
– How many people does this specific process affect?
– How much time do people spend working within the constraints of the current process?
– What would we gain if we spent time working to improve this process? (Gains should be measurable, as in dollars, hours or other value metrics that are quantifiable.)
– What other teams / processes would be impacted by changes to the current process, and how? Would those impacts serve as impediments? Is the amount of effort justified by the anticipated value of forming a new process?

Before deciding what initiative to devote time and effort to, companies may take a vote on which process or workflow they feel would most benefit from improvement. Once a topic is agreed upon, the team may come together to brainstorm. At this point, many teams follow a series of steps that go something like this:

1.    Map out the existing process using a project board or a kanban board.  A project board can be a whiteboard that is populated with sticky notes. Each sticky note should represent a single piece of the process or action item. Teams should break down each process step as much as possible so that each step is clearly identified. Laying out sticky notes in a linear fashion (or whatever configuration best represents the process) is a good way for everyone to visualize what the process looks like and to understand how each piece fits together. Using a visual project board also helps people understand a process, even if they are not necessarily involved in it. Involving the un-involved in the formation of new processes may seem counterintuitive, but it helps to have fresh eyes viewing the process for the first time to become aware of things that may not have been so obvious to the team looking at the process every day.

2.    Identify areas of opportunity surrounding the mapped process. To do this, teams should analyze the current process and scrutinize areas that may be streamlined. For example, are there ways to reduce the time it takes for something to become approved? Are there unnecessary steps that are creating bottlenecks and/or causing people to wait? A classic example of process streamlining can be found in the manufacturing industry and the reduction of steps a worker must take to carry a widget from one location to another. Instead of requiring the worker to move faster (which does little but impose ineffective process management and lower the morale of the individual), the company moves the bin containing the widgets closer to the drop-off location, saving the worker several steps and saving the company seconds per work item completed, or seconds that get shaved off the total time it takes to manufacture one widget. While the immediate impact of one or two seconds may not seem to equate to very much money, it adds up over time.

3.    Finally, the team decides on a new process. Once all opportunities have been identified, the team works together to create a new process. The new process should be communicated to everyone who is impacted, and action steps may be taken away by certain team members who volunteer to help integrate the new process into the company. For example, if the new process impacts another process, the takeaway would be to work with a spokesperson for the impacted process to make the modifications that are necessary to accommodate the new process.

Continuous improvement is a great way for companies to identify opportunities and integrate improvements into the day-to-day workings of the company. Once continuous improvement has become second nature within the organizational culture, your team will begin to find opportunities in the most unexpected places, creating an environment that nurtures innovation and fosters a sense of ownership and pride among individuals.