I’m going to break it down into two parts.
1. For a single task, I’ll Give You 8 ways to improve your productivity.
2. If multitasking is a time management issue, I’ll share a set of time management tools I use -- Fota.
Let’s start with the first part...
How can you be more productive when faced with a single task
Let me give you an example of how to make a cup of bubble tea faster.
Note: Each of the following levels of acceleration, needs to be increased in order, that is, if you can not achieve the first level of acceleration, the second level of acceleration will be greatly reduced, and so on. It’s like driving a car, you’re in low gear, you can’t get up any faster, you’re gonna hurt the car, you’re gonna have to work your way up.
Level 1 acceleration: understood
Suppose you want to open the fastest boba tea shop in the city, but you don’t know how to make Boba Tea. How do you speed up the process?
First, of course, you have to understand this, which means you have to figure out how on Earth a Cup of bubble tea is made from 0 to 1? For example, what is the raw material, pearl production method is how, tea should choose what varieties, what is the standard of delicious and so on..
Anyway, you have to be able to make a cup of tea, something that can be done, to be able to talk about how to speed things up, right? It’s like when you’re racing, you have to have a license, you have to know how to drive, and then you have to figure out how to drive faster.
But look at the day-to-day work of a lot of people, and a lot of times it’s not.
When a task comes, the first thing to do is not to try to figure it out first, but to follow your intuition, take it for granted, do it with your hands up, and try to complete the task as quickly as possible.
Failed?
No!
Where to fall where to get up, continue to do diligently, heaven reward diligent!
For example, if you are a new salesman and you want to improve your business quickly, then you will run to the customers, sweeping, handing out leaflets, making strange phone calls, advertising on the internet... All day long he seemed hardworking, tough and not afraid to say no.
Can want the result to still can not appear, the client ignores you, the result is zero egg..
And then you start complaining about how you’re doing everything you can, how you can’t Get What You Want, how the company cheats, how you’re deprived of your youth..
Why is this happening?
That’s because you don’t know it yet!
Do not know the sales method, do not know the persuasion skills, see no matter how many people are useless.
If you don’t take the time to learn the right method first, you’ll waste more time doing useless repetitions! If you use the wrong method a hundred times, the correct result will not appear.
Therefore, the first stage of improving the speed of work, is to first understand this thing to know what is going on, what requirements to achieve their goals, what knowledge and skills they still lack and so on...
How, exactly?
Learn from the past
The first response to something you don’t know yet is not to try it first, or to do it intuitively first, but to understand it first, to find out what others have learned, and to act accordingly.
For example, the boss wants you to make a project plan. You Can’t just slap your head and start listing your ideas. Instead, you should first understand what a project plan is and what a good proposal needs to contain, consider what factors, what information and data are needed, where to get them, etc. . Pick up a few good examples and study them.
2. Experiment on yourself
If you really can’t find a good way, you need to experiment to find it.
For example, if you want to make mustard milk tea, ice cream milk tea, old dry mother milk tea... then you can replace some of the ingredients and links to do experiments based on the traditional production method, or we could get some of our friends in the field to work on it.
In short, this time do not think of the “Acceleration”of the problem, the first road through is the first.
“Meeting”is the first step to “Fast”.
This process of learning and exploration, is like finding the key ingredient to achieving a goal in a pile of unknowns.
Initiate Level 1 acceleration:
Now, if you passed the study, has been able to make a cup of milk tea pearl, Congratulations!
But you’re not very good at it, and you’re always scrambling:
Is boiling black syrup, want to wait is also waiting, so to synchronize the preparation of tea;
Just find tea, syrup has boiled, quickly to off the fire, and then back to boil tea;
While waiting, she stirred the milk tea, adding the powdered milk to the rim of the spoon. She stirred the water and began to stir
Huh? Why does this milk look weird?
At a glance, the original mistake tapioca as milk powder, quickly dumped..
Tapioca? Ah, forgot to put tapioca in the syrup!
Quickly shook a spoonful of tapioca powder into the syrup..
Ah! The syrup is cold, it won’t congeal, it’s mud!
So, I had to throw it away and start over...
And so, while you already have the ability to make bubble tea, it doesn’t always work: for example, one time you put too much sugar in it, making it too bitter to eat; for example, one time you put the tapioca dough for too long, making it too dry to form a pearl...
This results in a slow overall production rate, averaging 3 hours to make a successful cup!
Besides, the quality is different every time...
Once, you made a cup of silky mellow fragrance, Q bomb non-stick teeth, good to drink the pearl milk tea, ecstatic!
And then I thought, Hey, how did you do that?
How long has the tea been boiling? What is the ratio of tea to milk? How did the pearls get so Q-shaped this time? What is the ratio of tapioca powder, brown sugar and water?
I forgot...
I forgot!
And then, you can’t make it any more...
Yikes...
What do we do? How do we stabilize the mass, speed it up?
At this point, you need to enter the second phase of acceleration: SOP.
Level 2 acceleration: SOP
What’s Sop?
SOP, full name: Standard Operating Procedure. It sounds a little obscure, but in a nutshell: process + standardization.
Flowerization
The so-called process, is to achieve a certain result of the process to be fixed: the first step to do, the second step to do, the third step to do... List it like a list.
Then, each time according to this fixed flow to perform the operation, can not skip, change, less steps, must be strictly implemented, like a computer program.
With this process, there will be no mistakes in the process, each moment, you will be very clear about what to do, what to do next, not busy, lose track of time, efficiency will be very high, the desired result will be the same as the clock.
You may think, not so complicated, make a milk tea only, do a few more times, skilled also remember, but if it is more complex task? Or are you under stress?
For example, a doctor to do a life-and-death operation, the link is complicated, and the responsibility is great, when it is easy to make a mistake, or even cause a serious accident, such as forgetting to disinfect the scalpel, gauze left in the patient’s body, and so on...
By changing “Disorder”to “Order”and fixing “Correct experience”to “Steps”, you can make “Success replicable”and get things done much more efficiently.
So, as you learn, change, and explore, make a note of each step, and once you find that one time works particularly well, make that “Success”a step in your next “Workflow.” This process is called “Flow.”.
2. Standardization
In addition to fixing the steps, you have to fix the criteria for each step.
For example, many Chinese chefs, when teaching cooking methods will often say: “A little salt, add a little spicy, stew for a while, see both sides of the golden can be out of the pot...”
After listening to a confused, you asked him: “How much is a little? How Long is a while? How to calculate two sides of gold?”
You will get an unimpeachable answer: “By feeling! This is a craft, you can master over time, no other, familiar hands!”
Great, master, please accept my disciple’s bow!
As a result, it is clearly the same brothers, 100 students in the eyes of 100 different masters, what you can taste is all up to luck...
What is standardization?
Is to have clear, quantifiable criteria for each step.
Mcdonald’s, for example, has more than 30,000 outlets worldwide, spanning six continents and 119 countries, yet the Big Mac Burger tastes almost exactly the same. Why?
That’s because every store in the world has the same steps, standards, and even ingredients for making the Big Mac Burger. For example, the requirements for beef patties are: “The ingredients must be 83% beef shoulder and 17% pork belly, the fat content must be between 16% and 19% , the diameter of the patties is 95.8 mm, the thickness is 5.65 mm, the weight is 47.32 g...”
You see, it’s so accurate to ask for just one ingredient. Then, like cooking furnace temperature, time, seasoning, are accurate to how many degrees, how many seconds, how many grams...
That way, even an ordinary person who doesn’t know anything about cooking and has never made a hamburger can make the exact same burger in just the right amount of time, heat and taste if they follow the exact SOP, this is the power of standardization.
Process + standardization = SOP
With SOP, you can go from relying on experience and craft + luck to relying on rules and processes. After you SOP your work, the result will become controllable, the process becomes orderly, the efficiency will be much higher.
And more importantly, your “Ability”can be copied, into the ability of the team, into the ability of the organization, into the productivity of the machine, and the efficiency of the whole team and society will be greatly improved.
The SOP is the single most important step in improving efficiency, and if it doesn’t, the next steps may not matter to you.
You may ask, what about some jobs that don’t make it through Sop?
Such as handicrafts, painting, writing songs, writing novels and so on... These can’t be completely standardized.
Yes, it is. Because the value of these products comes from its unique, it is different, its personality publicity, it does not need to be the same every time, but every time is different. But that comes at the expense of efficiency, and if you try to SOP them all up, you can drastically reduce their value.
So, SOP also has its scope, when you face this kind of work, you need to make a trade-off between “Value”and “Efficiency”, to find their own balance, do not greedy, fish and bear’s paw here is difficult to get both.
Of course, with the continued development of AI technology, the future may be able to break this bottleneck, as well as efficiency and uniqueness, let us wait and see.
Okay, this is the second-order acceleration SOP
The essence of it is to take the key elements of disorder, and turn them into standard, ordered, quantifiable actions, and then use that as a standard, and do it step by step every time, to ensure efficiency.
At a low level, this is the SOP for a task, and at a high level, it can be your detailed plan for achieving a goal.
Initiate level 2 acceleration:
Realizing this, you comb through the sops for making bubble tea:
According to this SOP, you have finally reduced the production time of a cup of pearl milk tea to 50 minutes, the production process is well organized, and the quality is stable!
But this speed is still very slow ah, next how to further improve the speed?
Level 3 acceleration: optimizing the SOP
Although a summary of the SOP, speed and quality have become guaranteed, but this SOP is the fastest, best?
Of course not!
Because of SOP, there is no best, only better.
The purpose of an SOP is to pin down the steps you perform each time, to ensure that the process is orderly and results manageable, but that doesn’t mean the process itself is perfect, and that it can be optimized over time.
For example, Rubik’s Cube is an extremely difficult puzzle toy, but with the emergence of its solution SOP, it has changed from an almost impossible task to a simple game that ordinary people can recover from in five minutes, with the continuous iteration of its SOP, the world-class master can even reduce the third-order cube recovery time to less than 5 seconds!
How Do you optimize your SOP?
Streamlining
Find the extra steps in your SOP and just eliminate them.
For example, according to the writing process, here I need a case to explain what is called “Streamlining steps”, think about it, presumably you can also understand what “Streamlining steps”means, so here I do not write a case.
2. replace
Find the better step in your SOP to replace the original step.
For example, in the era of film cameras, there was a problem that plagued users. If the film was not used up, if the back cover was opened accidentally, the film would be exposed, and all the photos taken before that were scrapped, this greatly affects the user’s photo-taking efficiency, how to do?
One old lady changed the film placement. She rolled out the blank film before putting it in the camera, then put it inside out so that one shot would roll into the film until it was finished. In this new way, if the user is not careful to open the back cover, exposure is blank film, this problem was easily solved.
She then patented the process, which she later sold to Kodak for $700,000 in royalties.
3. integration
The steps in the original SOP are merged into one step.
Do you like taking pictures? As the daily shooting conditions are no better than the studio, the finished product is always so and so inadequate, in order to make a photo more perfect and artistic, you have to go through exposure, brightness, color balance, gradation, hue, saturation, contrast, and so on, to get the picture back to life, which used to be a difficult technical task.
But now, professional image processing software, has merged these complex steps into one: filters. All you have to do is change the filter, and you’ve done dozens of these things, and a very artistic image can appear right away, which makes it much easier for the average person to do, and everyone becomes a master of Photoshop.
Initiate level 3 acceleration:
After many conversations with your peers and trial and error, you’ve now narrowed down the number of steps that should have taken you from 15 to nine. According to this new SOP, the whole production time is only 40 minutes, great!
But in practice, you still often time out, sometimes even took an hour to complete, what is this situation?
It turns out that you waste a lot of unnecessary time making milk tea:
For example, I suddenly received a phone call from a friend, and interrupted the production. For example, I had a fight with my girlfriend yesterday and didn’t come to my senses for 10 minutes. For example, the music was so good that my body couldn’t help rocking to the rhythm, forget the pan of the pearl has been boiled into paste ~
On top of that, there are also some times in SOP that are low in utilization:
For example, it takes 15 minutes to boil a pearl, but you don’t have to wait for it to boil. You can set a reminder time and then do something else during that time, such as making a tea base at the same time.
If you can cut out all these inefficient time, so that every minute of the process is doing productive action, then the efficiency will be greatly improved!
How, exactly?
Level 4 acceleration: cut out inefficient time
Cut out the distractions
That is, when you are at work, you need to take the initiative to put yourself into a “Focused”state, isolated from external distractions, clear your mind, focus on only one thing. Focus is the guarantee of efficiency, but focus can improve efficiency, he has a premise, that is, must first have SOP, no SOP focus, may be in a daze and busy...
2. Cut the waiting time
Some things, need to wait a certain amount of time to get results, this waiting process, is you can use the time again.
For example, if you are in sales and it takes a long time to build trust with a new user, what should you do? Performance waits for no man. Advance your closing request?
Trust is not enough, you put the closing request is easy to be rejected, such or have to wait, the opportunity not to show cards in advance.
But this time, you can open a sales SOP with another unknown user at the same time, follow up with multiple users, the overall performance growth rate will be greatly increased.
This process is called parallelism.
In other cases, the two steps in the SOP have a long moving distance. For example, when you make milk tea, the tapioca cabinet is 10 meters away from the table, and it takes one minute to go back and forth, which is not productive, so place the tapioca flour in a convenient place on the table and cut out the inactive time.
This process is called a short circuit.
3. Cut down on breaks
In addition to waiting and distraction time, there is also “Rest”time is not productive, you should cut!
It’s, uh... Isn’t that outrageous? Workaholics don’t wear those...
It’s not that you need to stop sleeping, it’s that you need to find a way to make your bedtime productive. How?
People need to eat and sleep, the machine does not need, there is a part of the work, you can hand over to the machine or program to complete automatically?
Of course you can.
For example, my first job was in sales at a securities company. I wasn’t good at face-to-face communication with clients, I wasn’t good at talking to strangers, and I had no social resources?
My Way: advertise on the Internet...
At that time there was no Wechat, Weibo, and so on, netizens gathered most of the place is the major forum, then I am going to pour water?
Yeah, it was pretty rough back then. But I think this is still too inefficient, so I installed an automatic posting software, imported a very long list of forums, and then let the computer for me to automatically register, publish... On top of that, I built a seemingly professional website and then went to Baidu to do the bidding ranking (at that time the number of people doing it was very small) .
This operation, automatic script and Baidu can 24 hours a day for me to work, even if I sleep, business is still developing, I just need to wait for customers on the line.
In such a “Lazy”state of work, my performance is able to occupy the company’s top 10 sales force hundreds of people year-round, the secret is more these “Will not rest helper.
Initiate Level 4 acceleration:
After the fourth level of acceleration, you frantically compress the time, the parallel, the short circuit, the cell phone silence, music off, concentrate, do not waste a minute.
Finally, you can now make a cup of bubble tea in 30 minutes, from 3 hours to 30 minutes!
But given that time is compressed to the point where it’s still a long way from being the fastest in the city, what’s the next step?
Level 5 acceleration: gradual increase in efficiency
If the whole SOP seems to be running out of room for optimization, take each step apart and analyze it separately to see if each step can be optimized on its own?
Here are two ways you can improve the efficiency of each step:
Make it faster with deliberate practice
For example, in the process of making pearls, one step is to add tapioca powder into the boiling brown sugar water, and quickly stir to form a tapioca ball.
The whole process is not only tedious, but also requires a certain skill. It may take 10 minutes to complete if you are not skilled. Can you shorten the time to 5 minutes through practice?
Of course you can.
To increase the speed at which you perform a certain routine, that’s a deliberate Armando.
2. Replace manpower with existing tools
However, no matter how much you practice, after all, it is still human strength, your maximum speed is limited by your body’s limits, and the body needs a long rest. What do we do?
You need to find tools to replace human flesh.
For example, I said earlier that the computer for my advertising, for me, to find forums, registration, posting, editing, publishing... And then repeated repeatedly, this series down, tired not to say, the efficiency is also particularly low, 3 minutes can be sent a good enough.
And leave it to the computer? That is nothing, according to SOP set a good script, 3 minutes can be sent dozens of, but also 24-hour non-stop hair, greatly improved efficiency...
So, take a look at what you’re doing right now, and what can be done by a machine?
For example, to make milk tea, you need to pick up a cup and Shake it a hundred times? Please give it to the machine!
For example, a good article to quickly typeset? Please give the software!
Like writing a love poem to your girlfriend? Please give it to Ai!
Theoretically, as long as your tasks have sops, almost every step here can be fully automated with machines instead. Dancing with a machine is an essential skill for every productive person of the future.
You can formulate a reasonable SOP, but also can master a variety of machines (people) , in this era you can with a hundred!
A gentleman is not different from others; he is good and false in things.
Initiate level 5 acceleration:
When you listen to the Enlightened, you immediately hand over to the machine all the steps in SOP that can be replaced by tools, the steps that can not be replaced by deliberate practice of hand speed.
After a few weeks, you see the machine running, your hands to fly, the whole process in one fell swoop. Now in just 15 minutes, a cup of Silky q-bomb, fragrant bubble tea will be in your hands!
But 15 minutes is still an unacceptable amount of waiting time, with four people waiting in line for an hour? Oh, my God!
What do we do? Hand speed has been practiced to the limit, even the machine is used, how can this also shorten?
Level 6 acceleration: precompression step
You think hard and suddenly realize that there are several steps in the whole SOP that are particularly time-consuming, such as the process of making pearls, you need to boil sugar water, make tapioca dough, knead into small balls, boil into water, then into ice water, then into sugar water and boil together. The steps are tedious and time-consuming, but all it takes is a few pearls in the milk tea!
Can a large number of pearls in advance, such as the opening of the day, directly in milk tea to join the production of good pearls?
Of course you can.
The steps remain the same, some of which are implemented ahead of time, and then the finished product is sealed up and then opened for use when needed, so that the efficiency of the site can be greatly improved.
This is a bit like the first “Compression”and then “Decompression”process, in advance to focus on processing, made a compression package, and so they need to be used, and then decompression to use.
Moreover, it used to be every cup of milk tea needs to do a pearl, this step has to be repeated, and now concentrated processing, one can do a large amount, can be used for hundreds of cups of milk tea, the overall efficiency is greatly improved.
A classic example of this approach is the standardization of Chinese food:
Chinese food used to be difficult to standardize and slow to produce. It usually takes more than ten or even dozens of steps to cook a dish. If any step goes wrong, the quality of the dish will be degraded?
And then the central kitchen appeared.
The central kitchen will wash, cut, mix and package the ingredients required for a dish, then package them in a package and ship them to the back of each restaurant. This process, it is equivalent to the cooking of several core SOP in advance to “Compress”into a semi-finished product.
Now, once the chef has the bag, the task becomes very simple: de-stress. Open the package, in order into the ingredients, sauce packets, stir-fry until cooked can be out of the pot...
Instead of taking 30 minutes to prepare a dish, it now takes 3 minutes, and the amount and taste is the same every time.
This is like the original you want to drink coffee, you need to grind coffee beans, and then brew, sugar, milk... Now compress all of these steps into a bag of instant coffee, and you just add boiling water to uncompress it into a nice cup of coffee, very efficiently.
How can you use this to further improve your productivity?
Then you need to work often need to use the longer, more repetitive steps in advance “Compression”into a module, and then when the need to call directly “Decompression”can be, you’ll be much more productive at work.
Let’s say you’re an artist:
Each task needs to design the layout, find the material, cutout, do the effect..
Many of the same purposes, such as the page header, article illustrations, long details page, posters and so on, the process is the same, requirements are similar, but the content is different.
That can make these same parts of the template, download the commonly used non-cutout material, so that each time you just need to open the template, directly replace the text in which the picture can be efficient to fly.
Let’s say you’re a programmer:
Every day to write thousands of lines of code, a lot of work, and the code is easy to make mistakes, the post-Debug process is very maddening, how to do?
The best way is to encapsulate some easy-to-use, trouble-free, high-frequency code snippets into “Library functions”, and then call them directly when you need them, programming efficiency would be greatly increased.
Or You’re a salesman:
Daily contact with a large number of strange users to promote products. Although the user is different, but you and they say the same thing, is to first attract their attention, then attract their interest, then build trust, finally bring about a deal.
So, you can follow these steps, in advance design several commonly used communication skills, such as users say “Expensive”, you should use the following 3 best response..
Then use this as a “Talking shop”, where you don’t have to organize your language on the spot when a customer asks a question or enters a specific sales phase, but directly from the library to call the corresponding content to customers to listen to it.
If it is online communication is more convenient, direct copy and paste, even talk time is saved, the effect is better. Now a lot of smart customer service robots use a similar principle.
In addition, you may need to attend various meetings, report on various jobs, study various courses..
Then you can design a set of meeting notes template in advance, report using PPT template, study notes template and so on, set the template of the plate, content, format, style..
That way, every time you take out a template and change the text, you don’t have to think about the structure, you don’t have to think about the completeness of the record, you have it all planned out in advance, you just have to fill in the blanks, when a student turns a short answer into a fill-in-the-blank, your office productivity will soar.
Initiate level 6 acceleration:
When you realize this, you feel that you have been opened up to both the governor and governor, and you immediately “Compress”many of the steps in SOP ahead of time, for example, made in advance for hundreds of cups of milk tea use of pearls, a good preparation of special syrup, made several large pot of tea, ready enough black and white milk and so on...
Today, the SOP on the spot is extremely simple: pick up a cup, put milk, sugar, pearls, add a tea base, then shake vigorously ten times, add ice, seal, done.
The whole process takes just 90 seconds. Oh, God! Three hours to 90 seconds, it’s like turning on a cheat!
Well, that’s not enough for you. A 90-second glass is fast, but you’re aiming for the fastest in the city, and now 10 people are buying at the same time, and there’s a 15-minute line...
What do we do? Do We have room for speed?
Level 7 acceleration: purchasing productivity
Of course I do. I’m gonna get help.
A person can only do 90 seconds to do a cup, that move 100 people, 90 seconds can do 100 cups?
Spending money on productivity, using Human wave attack, can make you almost infinitely more productive!
Is that really true?
First of all, you could die. Want to increase speed, it can be achieved by increasing productivity, but increase productivity is cost, if too high, or even eat up the benefits, it is not to do fast, but to die fast;
Second, the more people you have, the less productive you are. 100 more people to help you, not necessarily 100 times more efficient, if there is no reasonable division of labor and cooperation, the more people the more chaos, and may be even less efficient.
Well, how do we do that?
Division of Labor and cooperation based on SOP
You have to break it down based on SOP and have each person take one or more of the steps and work together to make a cup of milk tea, rather than rushing to fill up the gaps where there are fewer people, or we could all go through a process on our own. Why?
First, because of limited resources:
For example, if the pearls are placed in a jar and only one spoon is available, if 100 people all come to get the pearls, they will fight each other, appear crowded and chaotic, or wait in line, and there will be a group of people who have nothing to do and are too busy to do anything, efficiency has not increased, and if everyone has a jar of pearls, the resources will multiply, resulting in a huge waste;
Second, everyone is different:
Some people are good at putting pearls in a glass, some people are good at pouring water on ice, and working together allows everyone in the process to do what they do best, thus improving overall efficiency
Third, reduce switching time:
Even if you can stay focused the whole time, the knowledge, skills, tools, and scenarios required for each step are different, and each step requires a change, and the change takes time, the effective division of labor and cooperation can reduce this part of the time to the minimum.
So, it’s not about getting as many people as possible to help you, but it’s about making a rational division of labor based on SOP, based on your available resources, so that everyone is in their place, and everyone is in a complete system, so that efficiency can be greatly improved, it’ll only make it worse.
SOP is to keep the work in order, and the division of labor based on SOP is to keep the cooperation in order within the system.
Order is the first principle of efficiency.
On the other hand, some of the teams in the daily work seem to have a lot of people, and each of them is very good individually, but after the goals and plans are set, the team as a whole is not very efficient. Why?
Probably, it is because of the disorder of internal cooperation: there is no clear SOP, the interface of communication is not unified, we are all fire fighters, where to go...
SOP can be simple, can be wrong, can keep changing, but not without, there is no clear process, standards, division of labor, we are a loose sand, seemingly lively, but a blow away.
2. Marginal revenue ≥ marginal cost
If you’re going to buy productivity, which means getting paid to help you be more productive, there’s one thing you always have to do in your head, and that’s to say, “Marginal revenue”is greater than or equal to “Marginal cost.” What do you mean?
Marginal cost, the amount of money you have to pay to add a new person (the total cost of selling an extra cup of tea) ;
The marginal revenue is the additional revenue that comes from adding a new person (for example, by selling 1,000 extra cups of milk tea per month, taking into account both short-term and long-term revenue) ;
Adding more people can increase efficiency, but the cost will also increase accordingly. After increasing to a certain extent, you will find the additional benefit of adding another person, is no longer enough to pay the new guy (because of the economics of diminishing returns) , then you should stop adding people, and the current state (marginal revenue = marginal cost) is the state in which you maximize your revenue.
At this point, you suddenly realize..
The original milk tea is not the faster the better, the line every day is probably not faster, but has come to this optimal point of profit, made a trade-off...
At the sweet spot, the acceleration comes to an end, not because you can’t accelerate any more, but because you don’t have to. The purpose of opening a tea shop is to make a profit, not to compete with others. Improving production speed is only one of the means. Don’t get caught up in the means and forget the goal.
Initiate level 7 acceleration:
You quickly recruit a few guys based on the level 7 acceleration method, and then assign them to their respective positions based on SOP, each responsible for one or two steps..
Now, through the division of Labor and cooperation, a cup of milk tea production time has been further compressed to 60 seconds, and can be made at the same time multiple cups of milk tea, five minutes to make only 3 cups of milk tea, can now be made 12 cups. This way, even if 30 customers buy at the same time, can be completed in 15 minutes, the efficiency is very fast, you are satisfied.
Of course, you know it could be faster, but to ensure that you don’t have to keep adding people to the profit maximization, you choose to open the store first and then decide whether to keep hiring based on the market.
Finally, your milk tea shop has opened, the business is very hot!
But the dream in your heart didn’t come true...
You wanted to be the fastest tea shop in the city, but now you have to compromise between efficiency and efficiency, the original idea now seems a little naive.
You once again passed the network red tea shop, looking at the endless line, knowing a smile, understand you!
Just as you were having an intimate relationship with the internet celebrity store manager, a handsome young man suddenly appeared in front of your eyes and handed you a business card of his own, said: “Hello, you do not look like to buy milk tea, is to open a milk tea shop?”? I’m the founder of Awl Tech, and we’re developing a fully automated bubble tea machine that uses controlled nuclear fusion, no one has to be on duty, and it takes three seconds to make a cup of tea from scratch. Would you like to know?”
As you look at the glowing man in front of you, a quote pops into your head that you’ve said a hundred times but never really take seriously: “Science and technology are the primary productive forces.”
Level 8 acceleration: technological progress
Yes, only the technical progress, can break through the existing conditions under the spell of the faster and more expensive!
Although you know that the person in front of you may be a liar, no, he is a liar, he opens the door to how you can use the latest, even proprietary, technology to empower yourself in your work, is the most worthwhile direction to explore for further improvement of efficiency.
Once that naive dream, perhaps there really is a realization of the day!
Summary
Just now, I showed you how to become more efficient when you are faced with a single task, using the example of “How to open the fastest bubble tea shop in the city”. There are eight stages:
Level 1 acceleration: understood. To increase the speed of a task, you must first understand the task. “Will”is the first step to “Fast.”. It’s not about fast, it’s about finding the key ingredient, in a pile of unknowns, to make the outcome achievable.
Level 2 acceleration: SOP. Once you understand the task, you want to turn these key elements of disorder, into an ordered, quantifiable standard action, fixed into a standard operating procedure SOP, and follow it each time.
Level 3 acceleration: optimizing the SOP. Since sops are not the best, they are only better. You can improve them by “Streamlining”, “Replacing”and “Merging”.
Level 4 acceleration: cut out inefficient time. To make every minute in the SOP productive, you need to cut out the inefficient times. You can “Focus”to cut out distractions; “Parallel”and “Short circuit”to cut out waiting; and “Machine replacement”to cut out breaks.
Level 5 acceleration: gradual increase in efficiency. To further compress the entire SOP, you can gradually improve the efficiency of each step through “Deliberate practice”and “Tools instead of labor.”.
Level 6 acceleration: precompression step. Perform the long, repetitive steps in the SOP ahead of time, “Compress”them into modules, and then “Decompress”the modules into new processes when needed.
Level 7 acceleration: purchasing productivity. When personal efficiency is optimized to the extreme, you need to recruit help, based on SOP through division of labor to improve efficiency, but must not let the cost out of control, to ensure that your “Marginal revenue”≥“Marginal cost”.
Level 8 acceleration: technological progress. Under the current conditions, “Marginal revenue = marginal cost”is the limit value of your acceleration. If you want to break through this bottleneck, only rely on technological progress, science and technology is the first productivity.
This is not a parallel relationship, but like a car’s gear change, you need to step up, the first step is not in place, the effect of the latter will be greatly reduced, only a steady increase, you can improve the speed to the extreme.
Well, here’s the first part, “Single tasking.”You can take these 8 steps to improve your productivity.
So, what if you’re multi-tasking?
That requires an effective time management method, and I’m going to share with you a very effective method that I’m using myself, called FOTA.
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