Here at chez López Drysdale, we've had some minor triumphs this month. One reminded me of some sort of Secrets of Consulting story:
We've lived in this house for about 14 years. Our kitchen was last renovated in the 70s. We have the same cooktop featured in The Brady Bunch kitchen. Hanging over that cooktop was a hulking, home-made, wooden monstrosity of a vent and light system that ended right at forehead level. It has put dents in many a head, too many times. The fan in it screamed out like a jet fan tumbling bowling balls, so we never used the fan. We hated that thing.
Last week the light fixture started to go. We could have replaced the horrible fluorescent light fixture...but we decided it was time to get out the 8-pound fix-all and take down the whole thing. It took about 20 minutes to take it down and was very satisfying. Now in the huge open space over the kitchen island where we installed a modern lighting system that will give us more effective lighting.
Why the heck didn't we do this 13.9 years ago? It would have saved a lot of headaches, conceptual and physical. It would have made hours and hours of time spent in the kitchen more enjoyable for many people. That started me thinking: how many other annoyances could we easily take out of our lives to make our overall quality of life improve? Or save time for other activities? I think because there were always "more important" things to be done, we never took care of this Big Rock. But now that the dang thing is gone, I realized that it's removal should have been more important that those other things.
Rudy's Rutabaga Rule reminds me that when I get rid of my number one problem, my second problem gets a promotion. There are more annoyances to move out the way, but seriously, let's not use that to keep us from removing #1 on a regular basis.
This week I had many very important tasks to complete. But along the way, I invested time in moving some minor annoyances out of the way. I wrote some macros to automate some tasks (automatically printing all the submodels in a data model, automatically producing some definition reports, helping to get a repository up and running, etc.). Now that I’ve solved those annoyances, I’ve freed up a few hours every week to work on my “real” job. Even though solving these minor annoyances was not part of my official to-do list, I had to do them to allow me the luxury of getting real work done later.
I’m convinced that I need to spend a few hours each week making my work more efficient. I could have waited until I has a big chunk of free time to solve all my problems, but I’m guessing those big chunks of free time are coming along any time soon.
What minor annoyances are becoming major time-sucks in your day? Could you or someone on your team help remove those annoyances? If you spend just 15 minutes a day you the return on your investment can be significant. Don’t let your major deliverables keep you from working on minor deliverables that can pay off significantly over time.
Amazing what an old 1970s kitchen design feature can teach you about software development, isn’t it?