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!

Kaizen

Kaizen is continuous improvement through elimination of waste. 

Plans

Failing to plan is planning to fail. This sentence holds through for most people. So remember that is good to plan. For instance, someone who has a plan for the day at least can follow the plan for the day and not worry about planning or getting bored. Perhaps it is good to start planning if you are one who hasn't already started doing so. :)

Business idea : Education

How you ever wondered what the best way to perform a certain task is? I believe this happens to everyone ever so often. And the manuals that we are given are just information overload. 

So the way to resolve this issue is to learn off people who has figured out a way to simplify the process. And that is where an education-based business comes into play.

There is a few things that you would need to get it started :

1) A location to hold your classes

2) Material needed to teach the subject matter

3) Practice and industry application of the subject matter

An example would be a yoga class. Some yoga classes would go for $20 per class of 1.5 hours. With a booking of let's say $100, you would just need 5 people to cover your cost. You then implement a yoga type, for instance Bikram Yoga that has over 20 different poses to perform. When the classes get big enough to be about 20 people, you are making a profit of $300 for each class.

The hardest part of this is to build reputation/brand name for yourself but once it is established, the money starts flowing in.

Book review: Bringing Home The Birkin

This book is the biography of Michael Tonello, a Birkin reseller that made lots of money by beating Hermes at its own game. It is a really good read packed with humour and vivid descriptions of the experiences he went through.

It entails how Michael got bored of the usual stuff he was doing as a hair stylist and took the chance to relocate to Barcelona, a place he fell in love with till this day. With meticulous details of how the story unfold, this book is cleverly written.

Look out for his perspective to life, which I find interesting, and also the way he packed details such as pictures and sketches to make it a great read.