Earlier today, I re-tweeted something from Ken Walden (SuperHatz on Twitter). In his tweet, Ken said: “Do something in your business to help make a process better by 5, 10, 15%, now. Simple actions are the most effective.”

Shortly after I re-tweeted Ken’s tweet, it occured to me that we mostly focus on long-term goals and grand achievements. Even when we deal with minute details, we often fail to do what Ken suggests - do something in our business to help make a process just a little bit better. It’s not that we don’t care to improve how our businesses are run or how we do our jobs- it’s just that we never stop and devote the time to make such improvements.

So this morning, I sat down with our talented front end developers Chris and Sean and we decided to do something to help make access to our site better. By 5, 10 or 15%. We looked at javascript and css, we discussed image compression, and we discussed how we serve-up files. We committed to see if we could, by the end of the day, make a modest improvement.

We did. By the end of the day, Chris and Sean refactored our core javascript and css code and we implemented a few other changes that gave us huge performance gains (far in excess of 15%). We felt good about what we did because we stopped, asked ourselves how we could improve something, and just did it. The results were real and immediate.

So - thanks a bunch Ken! The lesson for us: we must periodically stop and do something in our business to help make a process better by 5, 10, 15%. Simple things do make a difference. It’s important not to forget that.