When Things Get Busy

A disorganized but successful salesman wanted to restore order to his cluttered office and get control of his business. On Tuesday, he made a checklist of specific cleanup tasks he'd do every day to address the problems. He planned to enter three business cards from the overflowing pile into his mailing list program, clean out and review one paper customer file, file five old invoices, and contact one past customer for followup. On the first two days, he got through all the items on the list, and was very excited about the potential improvements - maybe this time he'd be able to truly clean up his chaotic messes!

On Thursday, he got a call that made him suddenly very busy and also made it very, very tempting to give up on the new standard work. The call was for some new business that would start the next day, business that he hadn't done before and that would need some significant preparation time. So he faced a decision.

Should he prepare for the new business, and skip the new improvement tasks? Or, should he stick to his checklist, do the improvement tasks, and risk being unprepared for the new business? Or, should he work furiously and try to do it all?

So often, we start a new initiative with high hopes, with dreams for a better world, with dreams for a cleaner office! Then, when we've barely gotten started, we get busy with some new crisis or opportunity and we're faced with this kind of a decision.

What happens to your "I'm-going-to-do-these-every-day" tasks when things get busy? Take a look at the Lean methods of Leader Standard Work if this kind of thing routinely happens in your business.