If you want to improve your productivity at work, consider what happens when you put a mattress on your car roof. It can be a familiar sight on a college campus and will teach you an important lesson.
Usually, you’ll see a college student who needs to move. He or she doesn’t have a lot of possessions and most can fit into a car. But the mattress is a different story. It’s too big to fit in a truck.
The student realizes the mattress can go on top of a car’s roof. Maybe someone else finds some string and ties the mattress down. It’s not a perfect fit as the top of a car is not the same shape as a bed frame.
As a result, you’ll see the driver and the passengers in the car, holding their hands out the window, trying to keep the mattress in place.
It’s not a bad strategy but it only works for short distances at low speeds.
Driving that involves a lot of starting and stopping or higher speeds reveals the problem with the mattress on the roof strategy. The more complicated the journey, the harder it is to keep the mattress on top of the car.
It’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t scale well under certain variables.
While you may not have to move a mattress at your job, do you have strategies that work well under certain conditions but not others?
Sometimes these are related to things that made you successful but now because of that success, they just don’t make sense anymore.
A business owner who’s getting started might write a personal note to every customer, making sure the customer is satisfied.
This works well for 20 customers but would it take too much of a leader’s time if the number of customers increased to 150? Suddenly, the owner is just writing notes all day.
The otherwise good process doesn’t scale well to larger numbers.
This doesn’t mean the practice should be abandoned. Perhaps, a printed card could convey most of the information and the owner could just add a personal line or two, instead of having to write the whole thing.
The goal is to find a way to duplicate the impact, without the process monopolizing your time.
This kind of evaluation can help you recover lost time and reprioritize your daily routine. It especially works well with procedures where people say they perform them because, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Don’t let your business be held back by the limited thinking of amateur mattress movers.
Maybe it’s time to bring Ken Okel to your next meeting…
Read any good books lately?
