Rethinking processes

"The status quo sometimes needs shaking up"

You may think that “process” sounds very limited to business and the work arena, but you probably just use different terminology in your private life. Cooking a meal involves some planning: what’s in your pantry, what to buy and when, how much time you need for the food to be ready at dinner time, etc… well: that’s a process, we just call it ‘planning’ in private life. Nothing scary about it at all, and it only differs from ‘business strategy’ in its content, length of time and scale.

Let's look at processes in everyday life and how to improve them...

We develop processes in two ways: as we go along or by planning things out. Planning often happens organically: when multiple things need to happen at the same time (like a venue, catering and presents for a birthday party) you most likely take a moment to sit down and make a plan, i.e., you create a process. The more complex something is, the more likely you need a process rather than letting things happen naturally.

You cannot always hope that the transition from things working organically to making a proper plan happens at the right time, though. Consider your email inbox: the organic process would be to respond to emails as they come in and then either delete the email or file it somewhere. If there are too many emails, you need to find a better strategy, like highlighting the important ones or creating a more elaborate folder structure.

Unfortunately, this requires you to see that the situation has changed and this is where we often falter. Gradual change is not our friend – we tend to be too late to recognise that things have gone wrong and then get overwhelmed trying to manage the change and develop a more refined process.

The solution sounds simple: review how you are doing things regularly and adjust as needed. Some processes will need revisiting more often than others. You likely will not need to make many changes to your laundry schedule, but having several kids with varying interest that change over time requires constant review to make sure it all fits into your day.

It also depends on the different processes that you have set up and how they interact with each other. It is good practice to keep processes as separate as possible as this allows to adjust each of them separately without having to reinvent not just the wheel but the whole wagon at each review.

A review can be as simple as taking a moment to walk yourself through a process, acknowledge any bottlenecks and find better ways to deal with them. Keep what works and change what doesn’t.

You may also consider if that new strategy you have found could improve other processes you are using. Maybe that time-saver you have found works elsewhere, a new tool can be used in other ways, or combining two tasks could save you some time?

Changing your processes requires time out. You’ll rarely find better ways to do something while you are stressed doing it. You need time to think, so make time.