Posts Tagged ‘efficiency’

Small business and startup tips: 5 ways to tune out distractions!

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Distractions abound.  Every day we start work and spend a great part of the day battling the noise that surrounds any small business owner or entrepreneur. The email, the Facebook, the Twitter, the cell phone, the landline, the snail mail, the deliveries, the lunch orders, the radio,the text messages, the  television, the newspapers, the YouTube videos – all conspire to dilute our focus, stifle our creativity, and distract from what is really important: growing our business in a productive, efficient environment. Finding ways to tune it out is important; sometimes a lack of noise helps you to think creatively, focus on what you need to accomplish, and reflect on what is working with your business and what is not. Great ideas can come in ways that surprise you, but rarely come amid the hubbub of everyday distraction.  So… here are 5 ideas of practical steps you can take to reduce the noise.

1. Turn off the apps. Try to limit your time with email, twitter, Facebook and the rest to specific times of the day. The constant ding-ding of alerts can greatly diminish your ability to get other work done. I find that if I can ignore the incoming messages (whatever source the come from) I can think more clearly about what I am working on, accomplish goals in a shorter time, and complete my other tasks more efficiently and effectively. Productivity is only measured by what you actually accomplish, not by how many emails you read, tweets you send, or blogs you read, so my recommendation is that you literally turn off those programs and feeds at certain times of the day and only turn them back on when you are ready to focus on them.

2. Work from home. The office can be a dark, bubbling tar-pit of conversations, jokes, music, and a multitude of other interruptions, all conspiring to keep you from your work and to hamper your ideas. Working from home allows you to pro-actively tune out the distractions and the commotion that come with working around a larger group of people.

3. Unsubscribe. I suspect that I have  subscriptions to 80 or 100 different blogs, newsletters, and email lists. These tend to pile up over time, many going unread and many others providing time-killing content, much of which I could do without. Purge, purge, purge – take the time to unsubscribe and cut these lists down to the ones that provide you real value and information that you actually use.

4. Make a list. Keep there clamor down by tuning it out with lists of the important things you are trying to accomplish on any given day, week, or month. I am a huge believer in using checklists to manage time, but they also serve to quiet the din that accompanies you everyday work.

5. Schedule yourself. A schedule can also help to reduce the interruptions that come with work. Scheduled meetings can cut down on the impromptu conversations, emails, and IM’s that accompany any project-in-progress by formalizing the conversation and questions that necessarily accompany a team effort. Scheduled phone calls will help to offhand calls that people make just because the “need to ask one quick question.” By scheduling time that is specifically devoted to a project or effort, you can reduce the number of unplanned, spontaneous interruptions that often dominate our days.

Photo: underminingme

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Posted in business, How To, start-up tips, Strategy | 3 Comments »

5 Tips for Entrepreneurs on maintaining your focus: checklists rock

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

As entrepreneurs and founders of businesses we have a great many balls in the air at any given time. The average day finds many of us actively managing a team, communicating with investors, raising funding, performing HR chores, recruiting, keeping the books, executing marketing plans, performing customer service, and taking out the trash. To accomplish all of this, we struggle mightily to stay efficient and to increase our own productivity, all the while struggling to find the personal capacity to do it all and to do it all well.

Keeping focus is the critical component in our days and our ability to do so can impact not just on how much work we can get done on a given day, but can also seriously effect the ultimate success or failure of our business.

One of the ways that I have learned to manage my own capacity, and maintain my own focus in the face of mighty of all manner of interruption, disturbance, interference, and hindrance is with a simple tool: the checklist. It is as low tech as low-tech gets: a piece of paper (in my case a Moleskin notebook) and a pen is all it takes to manage your own time, improve your efficiency, and increase your capacity. Here are 5 thoughts on why a checklist works and some tips for their use.

1. Efficiency has an ebb and a flow.
Face it: some days you are just better than others. We all have days when we are rocketing along, firing all cylinders and hitting one home run after the next. These are the great days when we can accomplish just about any task we have set for ourselves and these are the days that matter. Of course there will be the less-than-great days and these are the ones that require you to focus all the harder to maintain your productivity. On bad days I am even more dependent on the simple unadorned checklist I use to keep me focused, force me to be task-oriented, and drive me through in spite of that low-tide of efficiency.

2. Distractions abound.
Business (and life in general) is full of distractions, great and small and the humble checklist helps me to keep my priorities well ordered. Email, for instance, is one of the greatest enemies of productivity; plenty of studies have shown that reading and answering your emails in the course of the day can make it very difficult to shift focus back to other tasks. I find myself looking to the checklist after a round of emailing to help me get my mind back onto the other tasks that I have set for myself that day.

3. (Lack of) memory is the enemy.
I don’t know about you, but I sometimes just plain forget things. That call I need to make; the email I need to send, or the checks I need to sign. Put them down on your list as they occur to you – a good trick is to maintain a separate list of little stuff; chores such as phone calls, emails, and simple undertakings. Your “big” list is composed of higher level activities and should include just 2-3 items per day; these are things that require deeper thinking, such as strategic planning, analysis, and writing and may often require hours of your time, as opposed to the little chores which will take you mere minutes.

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Posted in business, How To, inspiration, start-up tips, Strategy | 9 Comments »

5 thoughts for small business on delivering efficiency

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

In his book “The Goal,” Eliyahu Goldratt tells the story of  a Boy Scout troop out for a hike. The goal of the hike is to cover 10 miles in 5 hours, in other words to keep the troop moving at an average speed of 2 miles per hour. As the troop works its way up the trail, gaps begin to appear between the scouts, and the slower hikers find that periodically they must go double-time to shrink the gaps. The scout leader observes how the gaps between the kids are magnified the further down the line he looks, and it becomes clear that the fluctuations in each individual hiker’s pace are impacting those behind. As the hike proceeds, the process gets less efficient, because the hikers must expend more energy to close the gaps, and by the time the group reaches the half way mark, they have fallen behind by almost 2 hours.

One scout, Herbie, is the slowest of the hikers and so his speed governs that of the entire group. Putting Herbie at the end of the line does nothing to speed the group’s overall progress, but instead further limits the group’s speed by effectively reducing the pace for everyone. It is only after the scout leader comes to a key realization, that he finds the way to improve the overall speed of the troop. The insight? If the efficiency of an entire process is governed by it’s most inefficient operation (Herbie), then, to reduce the fluctuations (along with the extra “energy” expended), change the order of operations by putting that one before the others. Next, improve that least efficient operation (Herbie) to increase the overall speed of the entire process.

So what does the scout leader do with this new realization? First he moves Herbie to the front of the pack. This has the effect of  removing much of the variation in each hiker’s speed (eliminating the gaps between the hikers) and with the fluctuation reduced, the hikers don’t have to struggle so much to “catch up” when they fall behind, nor must they expend as much energy as they perform their individual roles. Next, the troop leader decides that he needs to find a way to help Herbie speed up, and by doing that, speed up the entire hike. How? He asks Herbie for his backpack, empties it and divides all of the heavy equipment between the other (faster and stronger) hikers. By lightening his load the scout leader has given Herbie the ability to walk faster. The result? Herbie is still the slowest hiker, but he is faster than he was before and so then is the rest of the troop. Bingo!

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Posted in business, How To, start-up tips, Strategy | 1 Comment »

How I Stay Efficient – My Three Hour Rule

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Some people are more efficient than others. There are many reasons for this: ability to focus, complexity of the work, distractions, etc. But while some  have unique skills and intellect to get things done quickly, most people must develop systems to help them improve their efficiency and balance many diverse tasks.

Some rely on to-do lists to stay efficient and focused. I’ve tried working with to-do lists and have failed miserably.

Years ago, while managing dozens of complex cases as a trial attorney, I started focusing on three major priorities every day, breaking the day down into 3 hour blocks of time. That system has worked  well for me and has helped me to manage a massive amount of work as an entrepreneur. That doesn’t mean that I ignore small tasks – I accomplish many smaller tasks during the day. But it does mean that I make the accomplishment of three major tasks a key part of my daily routine.

What I do works  well for me but might not work for you. There’s no perfect system for everybody – but everybody could benefit from a regular practice. Here’s what I do regularly:

What do you do to stay efficient?

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Posted in business, How To, social media, start-up tips, Strategy | 4 Comments »

Small business and startup tip: attack that bottleneck!

Monday, November 30th, 2009

When last I left you, I was off to enjoy my delicious hot pizza. Let me tell you, it was yummy! While eating it I was considering how we might help out this local business by offering to show them ways that they might increase efficiency by eliminating a bottleneck in their process flow. Just to remind you, we used a methodology called “capacity analysis” to identify the bottleneck in the pizza shop’s process. This bottleneck determined the pizza shop’s “theoretical capacity,” or the maximum number of pizzas they could produce and sell in a given hour. We looked at three “resource pools:” the oven could bake up to 20 pizzas per hour, the order taker/cashier could sell 18.75 pizzas per hour, and the pizza chef (AKA “Bottleneck Boy”) could assemble and load 15 pizzas per hour. (You can read the first part of this series here).

The Pizza shop could eliminate the bottleneck using two different strategies. One strategy would be to hire another pizza chef. Once this new worker is trained and fully up to speed, the output of this resource pool would be doubled, with a new maximum flow rate of 30 pizzas per hour! But would this really solve the problem? I think not. All this would do would be to add another salary, and only increase the maximum potential output by 3.75 pizzas per hour and make the cashier into the “new” bottleneck.

A different strategy might be more promising: increase the maximum potential output by reallocating the tasks performed by this resource pool and remove pressure from the pizza chef. Let’s look at the tasks performed by both workers:

Pizza chef (one batch of 5 pizzas):

  • preparing the sauce – 4 minutes
  • spinning the dough – 10 minutes
  • assembling the pie – 5 minutes
  • loading the oven – 1 minute per batch
  • TOTAL: 20 minutes

Order taker/cashier (one batch of 5 pizzas):

  • unloading/boxing – 1 minute per batch
  • payment – 3 minutes per order
  • TOTAL: 16 minutes

So, what if we also made the cashier responsible for the task of loading the pizzas into the oven? This would save the pizza chef 1 minute per batch for a new total of 19 minutes. Here is what the new formulas would look like:

Doesn’t seem like much, right? The pizza chef is still the bottleneck, but it does balance out the 3 resource pools a bit and if we consider the potential revenue it starts to add up, right? An increase of 0.8 pizzas per hour, over a 10 hour shift comes to 8 more pizzas to sell per day! If we assume that each pizza sells for an average of $10, then the total maximum revenue for the shop goes from $1,500 per day to $1,580 per day and increase of over 5.3%. Not bad considering that we didn’t spend a single penny in order to maximize revenue! Assuming the shop is open 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year the annual revenue could increase by as much as $29,120! All that extra cash generated just by having the cashier load the ovens. Sweet.

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Posted in Awesomeness, business, How To, inspiration, start-up tips, Strategy | 6 Comments »

Small business and startup tip: managing process flows to identify bottlenecks

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Every business can be improved and efficiency increased. One method to identify ways to make your business more efficient is to evaluate the “process flow” you use to produce your business “output,” whether your output is a product or a service. There are several components to this analysis and I will walk you through a fairly straightforward method to identify bottlenecks and increase capacity in your own processes.

As an example of this process, let’s consider the example of a pizza shop. A pizza shop sells its delicious, hot, and cheesy products to customers using the resources they have assembled to do so. In this case, those resources include the workers, the raw supplies, and the equipment necessary to produce that yummy thing. The question is how to go about looking for inefficiencies in the process which, when corrected, can allow a higher rate of production while utilizing fewer resources?

The answer? Capacity analysis. This problem-solving approach has several components which should be considered when examining a process:

  1. Throughput, or the average flow rate of a process (i.e. how many pizzas can be produced in one hour),
  2. Resource pools, or the interchangeable resource units that can perform an identical set of activities,
  3. Unit load, as measured in time per flow unit (for example, how many minutes it takes to prepare the dough for the pizza),
  4. Load batching, or the ability for one resource to process several flow units simultaneously,
  5. Scheduled availability, or the total hours that a resource is available for use (e.g. a pizza chef works an 8 hour shift, five days per week), and finally
  6. Theoretical capacity, or the maximum potential flow rate of a process based on the above combination of factors.

First thing to consider is “Flow rate measurement.” which can be expressed in the number of flow units per unit of time. For instance, how many pizzas does one shop produce in an hour? The average current flow rate can be determined by observing a process over a period of time and measuring the number of units that ass through the process. Computing the average number of flow units per unit of time is a simple step. For instance, if our pizza shop produced and sold 600 pizzas over 8 days, and each day consisted of 10 business hours, we can easily determine the flow rate to be 564/(8*10), or 7.5 pizzas per hour.

The maximum flow rate would be the number of “potential” pizzas which the shop could produce if it were using its resources in the most efficient manner. This number will of course be limited by the resources involved (i.e. how many cooks work a given shift, how many ovens are utilized, and how many customers can be served in a given 10-hour day).

The most important step is to determine the theoretical capacity of our pizza shop, and, in turn, identify the current “bottleneck” in the process. We can do this by analyzing all of the available resource pools (pizza chef, oven, order-taker/cashier, etc) to determine the theoretical capacity of each. This analysis will allow us to identify the bottleneck, or the slowest of the resource pools. Remember that the total theoretical capacity of our pizza shop is the maximum flow rate if all of the resources were being fully utilized. Therefore, capacity will be defined by (and limited to) the throughput of the slowest resource pool in the process.

Let’s start with one resource pool (the oven) and a simple computation which we can use to determine the Unit load for this resource pool. The oven is large enough to cook 5 pizzas simultaneously, therefore the “batch” size is equal to 5. Let’s say that it takes 15 minutes to bake a pizza, therefore the capacity of the oven will be:

If we do the same for our other resource pools, we can easily identify the slowest of these and, bingo! Our bottleneck is magically revealed! Let’s take a look at the other major resource pools, starting with the pizza chef. The chef has a number of activities which take up his time: preparing the sauce, spinning the dough, assembling the pie,  and loading it in the oven. Let’s assume that sauce preparation for a batch of five pizzas equals 4 minutes, that prepping the dough for those same 5 pizzas equals 10 minutes, that assembly takes another 5 minutes, and that loading takes 1 minute more. The total for the chef to produce one batch of 5 pizzas adds up to 20 minutes. The pizza chef unit load calculation would look like this:

The final resource pool is the order taker/cashier. Let’s assume that this worker is also responsible for removing the pizza from the oven, boxing it up, ringing the order and taking payment. Here’s how it breaks down: Unloading/boxing takes 1 minute per batch of 5, and payment takes 3 minutes per order. The cashier’s process takes a total of 4 minutes, and the unit load calculation would be:

The culprit here? The pizza chef, who is clearly the bottleneck and his productivity limits the total theoretical capacity of the shop to 150 pizzas per day. If we could improve the throughput time for the tasks performed by this resource, or reassign the tasks so that they are shared among the other resources, we could increase the theoretical capacity of the entire operation. Next week we will discuss some ways in which we might tackle that problem. Until then? Ooops. Sorry, gotta run. The doorbell just rang and my pizza is here!

(You can read part 2 of this post by clicking here)

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Posted in business, How To, inspiration, start-up tips, Strategy | 5 Comments »

Simple Things Make A Difference

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

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 occurred 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. For example, we allow people to upload logo design and web design concepts as JPGs and PNGs (for display in project galleries), but since we have many submitted images, the numbers do add up quite a bit. 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.

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Ideals and Reality

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

The 4-day workweek. The 4-hour work week. Sounds really nice, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to work 4 days every week and then play for 3 days?

It’s not surprising that tens of thousands of books have been written about efficiency, about working less, about being more productive, about getting more out of your day, etc. There are countless of blog posts written about this too, although I believe Seth Godin is spot on when he wrote in his blog two days ago that too much today is written simply to get the post noticed, not to offer anything of real value.

We can all agree that sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor (except maybe for a select few type-A personalities).

The reality is that it’s far easier to say “work smarter” than to actually figure out how to do that from the start. And this is especially challenging for start-ups (in any industry). After all, there is also the reality of operating a business – any business (except perhaps for those lucky businesses who after many years have successfully found a great balance between work and play). Sometimes, the ideals of a short week are more fantasy than reality. Sometimes, ideals can’t replace hard work. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with working hard when one must.

Below is a photo of Pete Burgeson, crowdSPRING’s Director of Marketing, at around 4:50 a.m. the morning we launched into private beta in March 2008. The smile on Pete’s face, after many loooooooong days and week says it all.

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