I was wandering around one of our manufacturing plants last week and got into an interesting discussion about how you cut a sheet of steel. No, I wouldn’t have thought that was interesting either, but I assure you it was. Why I hear you ask? Well, there was an interesting parallel between the many options for cutting these sheets, and how we manage how we Get Things Done. No really there is.
The crux of the question was two-fold – the balance between upfront investment with ongoing costs, and the balance of automation with the flexibility of manual work. Now as that last sentence didn’t make much sense, let me split it up and explain it a bit better:
Upfront Investment vs Ongoing Costs
The first thing to note is that ‘investment’ does not necessarily mean cash spent. More-often-than-not it relates to the amount of time spent on a problem or process. The two extremes here are spending a lot of time planning and preparing to do the work, and taking the work as it comes and dealing with the challenges on a reactive basis. Planning and preparation is risky because you may never do the work, the time and costs often spiral out of control, and you can never envisage every problem. But without planning, you will be spending much more time actually doing the work than otherwise, and it may turn out that the work was not worth doing – something you’ll only find out at the end if you don’t plan.
Automation vs Manual
Automation is a principle much encouraged by the likes of Tim Ferriss and Ramit Sethi, and it certainly has advantages - if creates efficiency, it saves time, and it allows you to shift your focus on other things. However, there are usually significant set up costs, a fair amount of trial-and-error is required to get the automation right, and when things do go wrong it is rarely simple to solve.
In the Business
In our business, the dynamic between these two elements can be illustrated as follows in how we cut a variety of different shaped orders from sheets of steel.
a) We can have a department which consolidates all the orders and plans the best way to cut these efficiently from our sheets of steel. This involves delaying the production and the learning of skills, but will mean we have much less wastage, and a reduced amount of labour time in the plant. This is upfront investment;
b) We can just send the orders direct to the plant and let them choose a piece of steel from which they can cut the shape. This has increased wastage and involves more skilled labour, but we are able to make the product more quickly. This is choosing ongoing costs;
c) We can purchase a software programme which will consolidate all the customer orders and calculate the most efficient way to cut all the shapes out. This can be combined with an automated racking system which chooses from a variety of off-cuts from which the next shape can be cut. This would be a massive investment, and there would be significant distruption to bring this in, but the day-to-day cost savings would be very attractive. This is automation; and
d) We can do the whole process manually as in a) and b). This is the lowest disruption option with no big set-up cost, but significantly slower and less efficient.
The solution of course is to find the balance in between.
So what does this mean for you and me?
We have the two dynamics when we decide how we keep ourselves productive. Are you going to plan your whole week every Sunday evening? Or are you going to just take things as they come? Are you going to splash out on GTD software across al your computers and your iphone? Or do you want to just use an notebook and pencil?
What is imporant is you quanify what it is you are trying to achieve – what are the demands on your time, and the practicalities of your daily life? Use these to choose where you need to be on these two scales.
