One side effect of strong work performance is how it influences other parts of life. This is often a good thing. I remember how success in process improvement projects encouraged me to reevaluate my diet and exercise methods. And the solution to my work email problem provided the template for organizing my personal inbox. (1)
In some cases, though, the blind application of successful practices leads to haste induced mistakes. This almost happened to me recently. My old cubicle at work was surrounded on three sides by soft walls. I could use pins to stick papers or notes up on them. I realized that I was creating bulletin boards when I walked into a VP's office one afternoon and saw how his expensive and store-bought bulletin board resembled my three walls.
Over time, my 'bulletin boards' became indispensable. Anything I needed to do the same day, I tacked on the left. Anything resembling a checklist, user manual, or reference material went on the right. And the back wall was reserved for relevant miscellany.
Of the three, the left wall was most useful. Rarely did I leave the office with anything tacked on that space- it was no coincidence that I rarely missed a deadline. But the other walls served a vital function. They helped organize what could very easily have become clutter.
One night, I was sitting on the couch in my apartment. I thought about how I often delayed simple admin. Rent checks always seemed to go out a day or two after I wrote them and teetering piles of paper tended to clutter my open table space. I realized that if I had a bulletin board, I could organize my apartment in the same way I organized my work.
How much could a bulletin board cost? I had no clue. My research found that new ones online seemed priced at random within a range of $25 to $75. A used one would run much less than that. With some diligence, I could probably find a perfectly acceptable option for between $15 and $25.
It was unclear where I would hang the board. The space above the table made sense for its proximity to my main clutter problem but the built-in shelf and fake fireplace frame would make it hard to fix in place. The wall next to my bed was open but I did not want the board to fall on me while I slept. The space on the wall between two of my windows was too narrow to fit a standard board. I was in no hurry and so I decided to mull the options over a couple of weeks.
During some downtime the next week at work, I looked more closely at my colleagues' walls. I noticed something interesting - not everyone used pins like I did. Anything with a built in adhesive, like a post-it note, went up just fine. A number of people used tape instead of pins to hold up pieces of paper.
A light went on in my head. I went home that night and looked again at my door. With some scotch tape and a few post-it notes, it would be just like a bulletin board. My door - or I should say, my new bulletin board - has been covered in paper and post-its ever since.
From one point of view, spending the $1 on tape meant I saved around $20. Not much, but still OK. From a different perspective, I saved up to 96% of my initial estimate, which sounds impressive but exaggerates the value. The most important thing is that I minimized the cost of getting organized. In the same way that my workplace saved the cost of individual bulletin boards by using cubicle walls in their place, I was able to give the unused space on the back of my door extra value by converting it into the world's worst bulletin board.
Footnotes / more ramblings about work
1. It does go both ways, though...
And just as often, life success influences work performance. My improvement as a manager was undoubtedly linked to volunteering at a food bank - each shift asked that I complete easily generalized responsibilities like assessing inventory levels, understanding client needs, and delegating tasks to match output to demand changes. After enough time, it becomes impossible to determine if work or life was the true catalyst.
