Optimizing Workflow
Posted on May 11, 2018
“…automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency… (and) automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Learning to effectively optimize your daily workflow can increase your efficiency and productivity by a huge margin. One thing that I’ve found very helpful in making the “thought” part of my work more efficient is writing down my thought-process in my daily agenda. It’s kind of a blow-by-blow, where I explain to myself what I’m doing and why. This has several effects:
- I can clearly see the overall goal that the project I’m working toward.
- I don’t have to rethink the same thoughts over and over, as they’re written down.
- I can get the benefit of rubber-ducking or peer reviewed work as it’s like peer reviewing my own work.
- I mark times in my notes and I can recognize if I’m spending too much time on something - this is especially useful as sometimes I can spend too much time on something that isn’t a high priority of the project.
- I get practice writing and explaining technical decisions.
Usually I have my bullet journal open on my desk ask I’m working. I’ve learned that getting the right level of detail is more an art than a science. For example, I spent an entire job analyzing a job to measure failure rates of a system I was tasked with designing only for me to realize that the failure I was trying to measure was already accounted for in the material of the design. The less thought you have to put into miscellaneous tasks, the more focused you can become toward appropriately contributing your part to the overall job.
One skill that I learned studying for exams in my engineering classes was using the Pomodoro method to study. I would study for 25 minutes then take a 5 minute break. This made it much easier for me to study because a nice little break was only ever at most 25 minutes away. I would eventually move to a 50 minute focus and a 10 minute break. I’ve incorporated what I’ve learned from using that technique to my workflow and these days I focus on a task-based system. I found that the Pomodoro method was effective at studying, however, on projects and jobs I would find that the break would cause me to lose track of what I was working on. I’ve since started using a task-based system where I will take a break after I finish a required task of the project. This greatly improves my productivity because I know that I can take a small break as soon as I finish up this “task”, and I don’t run into the problem of losing my train of thought.