Clutter free life

One of the main reasons of stress is the distractions you get in life. It throws you off balance because it is something different to what you are used to and it interrupts the flow.

Sometimes it is just very small things that can become major distractions. For instance, a messy desk.

One day, you might be given a sudden invitation to lunch with a colleague whom you wanted to catch up with for a long time. You were unprepared, so you started scrambling to get everything ready to go to lunch.

If you had a messy desk, you would start to stress out when you do not know where you keep your phone, your wallet and all the things you wanted to bring with you to lunch. Paired with the time constraint of making your colleague wait, you become more stressed out.

So the lesson of this story is to keep your work space clean and tidy. That also applies at home. By doing so, you will have 1 less thing to worry about in your daily life or when you are expected to drop everything and do something else.

Lean thinking example

Over in Telstra, I have learnt a lot. Being Australia's top telecommunications company and one of the top 10 companies in the ASX, it has a lot of good points to learn off.

However, like any big companies, there is a lot of fat in the company. Inefficiencies due to doubling up on work is just one of it.

In my department, I work across a few delivery centres. Sometimes, there are processes that are doubled up because the centres perform the same role without knowing what the other does.

To apply lean thinking, I first understand the processes of the two delivery centres. By knowing what they do in detail, I would be able to identify whether it is possible to merge the processes together and let it be performed in 1 delivery centre. By doing so, there are cost savings as the other team are freed up of the work and are able to perform a new process.

If this lean thinking methodology is applied enough, companies of any size will become competitive as there are no waste. The aim is to reduce waste to zero.

Happy implementing!

Distraction at work

Most people in a corporate job becomes a tool to their emails rather than it being the other way around.

The reason for this is because they constantly check emails and are on it for most of their working hours.

What it actually does is make someone seem to be busy and productive when it actual fact, for most people, this ist unproductive and distracting from the important tasks at hand.

One of the strategies to manage this distraction is to have a few set times where one checks their emails.

Happy implementing!