What’s up Grinders?
In preparation for the end of Q1 and the beginning of Q2, I’ve been doing a lot of process auditing and realizing that I don’t have processes firmly in place for a lot of activities. So I thought I’d talk a bit about my process for developing a process.
Now I get it, this is somewhat of an esoteric, academic exercise. But it does allow me to unironically use this picture.
First, I realize that I’m struggling with something. Something that I do a lot. Something that I may need to explain to someone else someday. I put on my manager hat and thing – if I were training someone to do this for me, how would I tell them to do it?
Usually, if it’s something I’m struggling with, I don’t really have a good explanation for how to do the task.
Then I spend some time thinking about exactly what I *actually* do when I’m doing the task. I write it out in a flowchart. Usually this is hastily scribbled in my notebook, and is really usually only legible to myself.
Then I look at this workflow, and I really sit and think if any of these steps can be improved. For this process, in which I’m recording my sales on Whatnot in my inventory management system, I’ve determined that it would be simpler if I put steps 1-3 into a process that I do *before* the Whatnot stream. That way I’m not unable to ship the cards until after I’ve gone through and conditioned and listed them in my system. Then I’m left only with steps 4-7. I’ll reevaluate these steps after effecting the changes determined in this first modification.
I try to only create one major modification per iteration, so I can really see how well it helps or doesn’t. Once I’ve settled on that change being worth keeping, I redo this process: draw it out, look at each step and see where the hold-ups are, float some kind of solution, test it out.
The end result is, well, it’s a never-ending process, but the output eventually is a pretty good process. I did a short video about my back stock pulling process recently. Check it out here: https://youtube.com/shorts/gVswpu5_2W4?feature=share
Video about Q1 into Q2 coming soon. I wasn’t able to shoot it last night, so I’m hoping I can tonight, or tomorrow during my midday break. Until then, keep Grinding!
Cheers!