Apologies in advance for degree dropping but… In this case, it’s relevant, I swear!
About the Episode:
Efficiency is not just the subject of my engineering degrees and early career. It’s truly a passion for me! And I love it because the more efficient I become, the lazier I can be… Because who said that your reward for doing all your tasks for the day should be MORE tasks?!? Let’s take a little crash course in efficiency so you can change your life, too!
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- Why you should focus on the process, not the person, when problem solving
- Why a clear externalized expectation will save you hours of arguing with yourself, your spouse, your kids, or anyone else who is trying to help you
- How the 5 Whys will help you analyze what you’re REALLY struggling with in your day-to-day processes
And so much more!
Resources Mentioned:
Follow me on Instagram @FarmhouseVernacular!
Shark Cordless Pet Stick Vacuum
Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the Vernacular Life Podcast, where we talk about anything and everything that could go on in our turn of the century Folk Victorian Farmhouse. I’m your host, Paige, as usual, and today, we’re going to talk about something really, really exciting, like super exciting. We’re going to talk about efficiency. Now, if you have been following along on Instagram or maybe on YouTube, you’ve probably seen that efficiency is kind of a thing that I love.
I have heard it described sometimes as laziness because lazy people are sort of naturally efficient because we want to get stuff done in the fastest amount of time with the least amount of effort, but efficiency is really so much more than just cutting down your time or getting more done in a day.
There’s a lot to it, and so I wanted to talk about three things as kind of a crash course into efficiency. Now, for a little bit of background, I feel like I’m talking about this all the time and I feel like this is such an engineer trait too, like a degree drop or something every time we do, but it’s truthfully very relevant. I have training as an engineer. That’s what I went to college for. I didn’t expect to end up in manufacturing, but after a couple of internships, that’s kind of where I ended up, and as a Manufacturing Engineer, what the heck did I do?
Now, you can go back and listen to the podcast where I talk about what engineering is and kind of what some of the jobs are in it, but as a Manufacturing Engineer, my main job was to look at the production floor and figure out how to get more product out faster, and a lot of times, people hear that and they sort of think of this like foreman, who’s yelling at everybody and saying, “Work faster,” “Work harder,” “Stop talking,” “Stop laying around,” and that wasn’t really what we did.
Manufacturing Engineers and Process Engineers’ main job is to look at the process and see where there is wasted time, see where things are just taking longer than they should, seeing where things are just taking more energy than they should, or there’s materials sitting around. We look for wastes in the process, and when we identify those wastes, we are able to eliminate them, and that means that usually for less effort, for less stress, for less time, we can make more products, and that was always our goal. In the kind of manufacturing process engineering that I did, our goal was not to work people harder. Our goal was to have people come in and know what they’re doing and be able to work at kind of a steady, moderate pace.
We’re not trying to work flat out. We’re not trying to make everybody exhausted by the time they got home, but if you can come in and you can work at a moderate pace and just kind of understand what you’re doing, how can we get the most results out of that level of work? For example, just kind of to give you an idea of the kind of things that we did, one of my jobs, I went in and they were assembling this thing.
It was made out of sheet metal and there were all these parts and there were gas connections and there were grates, and there were all these things, and it was taking a lot of time. Some of the time was taken up with the fact that a lot of these pieces were really big, so you’d have to bring all of this raw material to the assembly line, and then there was a lot of walking from station to station to retrieve all of the different parts that they needed, so I said, “Hey, let’s try kitting.”
What kitting is, is basically you put all of the parts that you need in one area, and then the associate pulls only from that one area, so it cut down on walking for most of the associates and it transferred all that walking to one person who’s refilling the kits, instead of all eight people on the production floor, walking all over the place to try to find what they need. That was the kind of thing we did, is we just looked for ways to make the work easier for people on the floor. Now, when I learned all of that, because I had no idea of any of this before I really started working in manufacturing, I would say that I was slightly inclined to it.
Even as a kid, I’ve always been very much into sorting and very much into efficiency, and just part of my personality structure is that I don’t like to expend more energy than I think is necessary on something, so I will often find the most efficient way to do it purely so that I can not work very hard, but as I learned about some of these kind of formal techniques for improving manufacturing processes, they naturally leaked over into my house, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today. We’re going to talk about three different things that, I think are really good takeaways.
They’re not only good for the production floor, but I think they’re really, really good things to keep in mind and to kind of implement in your house as you’re on your own efficiency journey. The first one, and this is, if you take nothing else away from this particular podcast episode, I think this is the biggest one, and that is that when there is something not working well, when there is something that is not efficient or running as smoothly as you would like, the first step is to blame the process, not the person.
Now, I am not a therapist, I am not a counselor, I am not an expert at relationships in between people, so if that is a resource that you need because you’re dealing with something or an interpersonal relationship within your family, by all means do that. I’m speaking about this from a manufacturing point of view. What blaming the person in manufacturing looks like is, well, they’re just working slow, or they’re just not working hard enough, or they’re just stupid and they don’t understand how to do this.
The thing is they might be true. You might have somebody on the manufacturing floor whose average work rate is slower than what you needed to be. You might have someone who needs retraining multiple times before they understand a process, but if you go to that first, if your first instinct is to jump at the person, that’s really hard to fix, and I also found this with myself because for a long time, with efficiency things and with wanting to get more done in my day, I would blame myself first.
I would say, “Paige, why are you so lazy?,” “Why do you just procrastinate?,” “Why can’t you just do this?,” or, “Why can’t you just suck it up?,” and it would just be this constant diatribe against myself about what I was failing at. The problem with that, the problem with blaming the person first is that processes are relatively easy to change.
People are really hard to change, so when we’re doing efficiency improvements, one of the things we want to do is look for the easiest, lowest hanging fruit that we possibly can. “What is the simplest way that I can make this process run better with the least amount of effort in the change?” You don’t want to start with the solution that’s going to cost everybody $40,000. If you have a problem and you go to propose that solution to your boss, and you say, “Well, this is going to work, but I need $200,000 to do it,” your boss is going to laugh at you. Your boss going to say, “Ah, no.”
“Go try something else first.” When we’re making these improvements, we want to try the things that we can control, and we can control the process. We can control the standards of the process. For me, I can’t really change my personality very much. I have learned how I like to work.
I have learned that I need a little bit of chaos. I’ve learned that I need the freedom of choice. I’ve learned that I can’t stick to super rigid time schedules. Like if you tell me that every Tuesday at 9:00 AM, I’m going to vacuum the dining room, I will lose my mind because I will feel constrained and I will get resentful, and then I won’t do it, so instead of berating yourself or your family members or the associate on the manufacturing floor, instead of treating them like the problem, our first line of defense is to blame the process. “What in the process is not working?”
What kind of things are part of the process? Well, training is part of the process. This was a huge one on the manufacturing floor. Sometimes we would get temps in, or we would get people who just started, and we’re seeing all sorts of defects, and it just comes down to the fact that they weren’t trained properly. We’d have the documentation, we would have the training instructions, and they just weren’t taught properly.
You can’t blame somebody for doing something wrong when they’ve never been taught the right way to do it. Sometimes too, even if they have been trained properly, the companion instructions were bad, so a lot of times we would have these visual pictures of each operation on the assembly line that would kind of tell you what to do, would say,
“Hey, make sure you put this screw here, or make sure you put this silicone over here,” and a lot of times those were outdated, those were nonexistent, those were just not helpful as a resource for the associate, so again, you can’t blame someone when they don’t know how to do something if you have not provided them with resources to help themselves.
Sometimes it’s just bad setup. People would be working flat out, they would be working so hard and they wouldn’t get everything they needed to done because they were walking all over the place or because they were reaching or because they were bending or because they were always running out of materials. These are all process-based issues that have nothing to do with the capabilities of the person doing them.
Something that I found working on production floors a lot, and maybe this was just my own personal kind of rose-colored glasses that I chose to see everything through, but I genuinely believe that people want to do a good job, and I think if you are frustrated with yourself because you’re not living up to your own internal expectations, that’s because you want to do a good job, and that’s how it is with me. I get so frustrated with myself and I’m like,
“Paige, why can’t you just not browse your phone for two hours? Can you just not do that? That would be great,” and so I think if we can not jump to blaming the person first, and instead, do absolutely everything in our power to make the process work harder for us, in a production environment, I saw law lot of results from that, as opposed to jumping immediately to blaming the person. If you have to get to blaming the person again, I’m going to refer you to specialists or therapists or counselors or somebody who is much more qualified to talk about that than I am.
I’m not talking about that, people. People and I are not … Let’s just say that’s not my strong suit. I can do processes, not necessarily people. The first tip I have is to blame the process first. Figure out what’s going wrong in the process that you have control over that you can fix before we start jumping to, “I’m so lazy,” or, “I’m just a failure,” or, “Everybody else is perfect except me,” or start blaming family members.
Now, the second tip that I have kind of goes along with that, and this is a very big one on manufacturing floors, because you have a lot of different people coming in and out, you have a lot of people working on the same thing, you have shift changes, you have job changes, job rotations, so the second tip is to externalize expectations. Now, what does that mean? That means that you have some way that you want this task done, or in the case of a manufacturing floor, there is a standard for this product that needs to be met.
If nobody knows what that standard is or if nobody knows how you expect the kitchen to be wiped down, nobody’s going to be able to hit it because it’s in your head, and I see this a lot … Very small sidebar rant here.
I see this a lot on social media of people being frustrated with their spouses. I see them saying things like, “Well, just look around. Can’t you see what’s wrong? Can’t you see what needs to be done?,” and I understand the sentiment because if you’re trying to keep your house tidy or you’re trying to do something with a business, or you’re trying to do anything, and it’s so clear to you what needs to be done, but everybody’s different. People operate differently.
People think differently, and I would see this on the manufacturing floor all the time. There would be these old-timers who have been here 20 years, they know the process inside and out, and then we get someone who’s been here for a month, and they’re just like, “Why can’t they just understand that this is how it’s supposed to go?” It’s like because they don’t have the background that you do. They don’t have the reference that you do. They don’t have the same standards that you do, and that’s why on manufacturing floors, it’s so important to put those expectations out there.
Now, in production, the way that those expectations are usually externalized is through standards, so there will be quality checks. “Is this sealed? Is this straight? Is this square, all of these screws tight?” The quality checks serve as kind of the safeguard, I guess, for those expectations, but when we’re training people and when we are teaching them how to assemble the product or how to build the thingamajig, part of it is saying, “This is what is critical in this process,” because in any process, you can massively, massively overdo it, like completely.
Imagine your job was to build a chair, and when you got done building the chair, you sat there with tweezers and a magnifying glass and pulled out all of the little lint balls that have piled up from the assembly process. That is a wildly inefficient way to do that, and it may not even matter. It might matter to you because you want them to look nice, but it’s not something that matters to the company because two stations down, they vacuum it all off, so externalizing expectations, it gets things out of your head.
It gets the standards in a place that everyone can see, and a lot of times it can kind of help you recognize if your standards are something that’s just unrealistic. Maybe it’s like, “Okay, I really want the house cleaned this way, but I can see that scrubbing the baseboards with a toothbrush every single week is a little bit unrealistic for me to expect of everybody else in the house, so I’ll give up on that, but in exchange, we’re going to do this other thing.”
I get so sad when I see people frustrated by the whole, “Well, why can’t you just look around and see everything that needs to be done” argument because I do really empathize with people who are overwhelmed and who are trying to do their best and who are trying to keep the house clean, or trying to make sure that all of the family members have all the things they need and they’re everywhere they’re supposed to be at the right time.
I understand how much of a mental burden that is, to keep track of all of that, and that’s why I strongly suggest getting all of that stuff out of your brain. If it’s out of your brain, then somebody else can execute it. Say, for example, in like postpartum period, that’s a huge thing that people always want help with or that I see people always want help with, and imagine someone comes over and says, “What can I do to help?” If you have a weekly chore chart written down and you say, “Those are the things that we do every week,” and you just point them to that chart, they know how they can tangibly help.
They know what your expectations are. “Oh, I need the rugs vacuumed, I need the window sills dusted, I need the toilets cleaned, and I need the floors mopped.” It’s like, “Fantastic. Wonderful. I can go do that.”
The goal of this is to communicate information without you having to be there saying, “You do this, you do this, you go do this. I need you to do this every single time.” Some of the ways that you can do that are things like chore charts. I like chore charts. I have one that’s working pretty well, but everybody needs to kind of figure out the way that their chore charts work best for themselves.
Another one is standard work, and this one, we use a lot on the manufacturing floor just because of how many different products. They’re hard to make, but standard work basically says, “When you’re performing this task, do these subtasks.” Cleaning the bathroom involves sweeping up the floor, cleaning the toilet, wiping down the sink, scrubbing the shower, mopping the floor.
That’s what you think cleaning the bathroom means, and having those written down and posted is just another way to get the expectations out of your head. Help people understand what you want out of the task so that you don’t have to do it every single time.
I’m going to put this disclaimer back in here because I’m not sitting here trying to be a relationship coach. I’m not sitting here saying that there aren’t partners and spouses that don’t pull their weight. That’s not what I’m saying at all, but per the first tip, we are trying to fix the process first, and if writing down a list of everything that cleaning the bathroom means and sticking it to the wall in the bathroom, if that prevents you from having to remind people of how to clean their bathroom, that’s completely worth it and that solves that problem.
We have this whole idea of we’re blaming the process, not the person, and to help with that, we’re going to externalize expectations so that other people can see what the process is, but the last one that I want to talk about is actually an exercise called the 5 Why Process. This is a root cause finding adventure, I guess you could say, because what it basically does is we’re looking for the root cause of a problem.
Now, the root cause of a problem is the thing that if corrected or fixed, will make the problem disappear completely, and it’s not always obvious what that is. Sometimes you have to try a couple different root causes. Sometimes you have to investigate some different options before you find the thing that eliminates the problem once and for all, but the 5 Why Process I have found exceptionally helpful in my own analysis of improving my personal efficiency, because on manufacturing floors, a lot of times you’re driven by data, so you can see your defect rate. You can see your scrap rate. You can see your efficiency numbers. You can calculate your on-time delivery.
You can calculate all of these different metrics, and that will inform where you need to make your improvements, but gathering data is time-consuming. In fact, it’s one of the things that interns usually do. I did a ton of it for four or five years when I was an engineering intern. It takes a long time to gather all that data, and then you have to look at it and you have to analyze it, and it’s completely worth it on the manufacturing floor because you’re talking about money in the bottom line basically, but in the home, I just don’t want to collect that much data for stuff. I’d rather use another metric to figure out how to make things better. The metric that I tend to use is severe negative emotion.
If there is some process or something that you hate, like every time you think about pulling out the vacuum to vacuum the stairs, you hate it, that is a really good indicator that there is a problem there that would benefit from this 5 Why analysis. How do we do the 5 Why? Well, it is five Why, W-H-Y as in the question, because you are going to make a statement, and then ask why, and then answer that question with another statement, and then ask why, and you’re going to keep doing that until you get to the answer. Well, that’s just how it is. I think we need to do an example though, because this is a little convoluted to just say out loud.
My famous example for this, my favorite one to use is vacuuming. Vacuuming was the absolute bane of my existence. I have no idea why. I couldn’t figure it out. I have tried to be a more consistent vacuumer for years, and nothing I did ever stuck, and of course, I broke the first rule and I would blame myself all the time instead of the process.
I would say, “Paige, why are you such a lazy housekeeper? Why are you so bad at cleaning? Why can’t you just get it together and be like a normal adult who cleans their house on time and reasonably? Why can’t you just do that? Why are you such a failure?,” which is a great internal monologue to have running through your head.
Eventually, one day I said, “Okay, this is bothering you a lot, so it probably means that you aren’t a terrible person, probably means that there’s something in the process that is making the enjoyment threshold of doing this activity so high that you don’t want to go anywhere near it, so let’s do the 5 Why Process, Paige. You hate vacuuming. Why?” Then, I thought about it for a little bit and I said, “Okay. Well, do I hate all vacuuming?”
“No. Okay. So what vacuuming do I actually hate? I hate vacuuming the wood floors. Okay, because there’s vacuuming the rugs, and then there’s vacuuming the wood floors. They’re not the same.”
I said, “Okay. If I’m okay vacuuming the rugs, but I hate vacuuming the wood floors, then that means I don’t hate vacuuming. There’s just something about the wood floors that I hate vacuuming. Okay.” That’s your first answer.
Then, we again ask, “Why?” “Why do you hate vacuuming the wood floors, Paige?” I was like, “Well, I really, really hate using the canister vacuum that I have. It’s heavy, it has a really short cord, it’s annoying to manipulate, you have to carry it around, and so you can’t move furniture out of the way, and I just really, really hate using that vacuum.” You say, “Okay. So you hate using the vacuum that you need to use to vacuum the wood floors.”
“Why? Well, I kind of just said it. It’s heavy, it’s awkward, there’s a short cord, I have to carry it around, and I just don’t like any of that.” Say, “Okay, so the canister is heavy, it’s awkward, it has a short cord, and you don’t like carrying it. Why?”
Now, this is where you get to the end of the process, because that’s just kind of how it is. That’s just a feature of that vacuum. There is a fixed cord length, there’s a fixed weight, there is a fixed way that you use it. That’s just sort of how it is. Once you do this 5 Why Process and you get to the answer of, “That’s just how it is,” you’re going to back up a question and you’re going to figure out and, well, if you back up a level, that will tell you roughly a possible root cause. “So I didn’t actually hate vacuuming and I wasn’t actually the slovenly person who didn’t know how to clean.”
“I just really, really, really hated my vacuum,” and then you can start brainstorming. It’s like, “Okay. What can I do? Could I put a longer cord on it? Yes, I could do that. Could I fashion a jet pack and wear the thing on my back and walk around with it like that?”
“Yes, I could. Could I go to intensive therapy to reduce my anger surrounding using this vacuum? Yes, I could absolutely do that.” Ultimately, what I decided to do was just throw a little money at the problem and I bought a cordless vacuum. I will make sure there’s a link in the show notes.
It is the Shark Cordless Pet Hair Vacuum. I’m not sure. I don’t remember exactly what it was. Night and day difference. When I think of vacuuming now, it is not this thing that fills me with existential dread.
I don’t mind it. The house gets vacuumed at least once, maybe twice a week, which is a huge improvement over the once every three months that it used to get vacuumed. By kind of engaging in this 5 Why Process, it really helps you dive into the actual process of what you’re doing and figure out the one little portion of it that’s throwing off everything else, because my personal philosophy on it is that if it’s bothering you enough to make your internal monologue berate you, then you probably value it and there’s something in the process that you can fix.
That’s been my experience. The 5 Why Process is really helpful for kind of drilling down and seeing if you can figure out the one little aspect of that process that’s ruining absolutely everything else, and if you can find that and correct it, a lot of times, this huge pain point will just vanish.
That’s pretty much what happened with the vacuuming. Now, these are just three different things about efficiency that I think translate really well to the home, this idea of blaming the process, not the person, making sure to externalize your expectations, and then using the 5 Why Process to identify root cause problems within that process. This is not all that there is about efficiency, and I’m going to do a little plug right here because I did write a book. The book is called Mastering Efficiency. It is an engineer’s guide to improving productivity in your life and home.
What this book is, is everything that I learned as a Manufacturing Engineer that I thought could possibly be helpful for people in their everyday lives. I looked at all of the different tools that we use on the manufacturing floor and I thought, “How can these be applied to your life? How can you use these tools to make things run more smoothly, to make things run more efficiently?” The kicker is that I’m not here to tell you what’s going to work because I don’t know. Every manufacturing floor was different.
Every production line was different. There were always different problems to solve, and people are exactly the same way. Your life is not like my life. I don’t know what’s going to fix it, but what this book does is give you the tools to figure out how to fix it yourself. You look at those problems, those pain points that are really bothering you personally, and then you can use the tools in this book to apply them to those pain points and see if you can come up with solutions that stick.
If you want to check that book out, you can use the code, Podcast for $5 off, and it is at farmhousevernacular.com/ebook. We’ve had rave reviews about it. People absolutely love it, people figuring out how to change their cat boxes better and people figuring out how to do their dishes better, and it’s just, I love it so much because I love efficiency and I love making improvements, and I want you to know how to make your own improvements, so if you’re interested in that book, definitely make sure to check it out, otherwise, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope you learned something a little bit about efficiency. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next time. Bye.