Waste
One striking thing Paul Akers says is that humans are waste factories. One of the key skills he challenges readers to learn in his book “2 Second Lean” is to see waste. That’s a whole other topic, but for now, let’s just start with this. Our work is full of waste. While it clearly works to be wasting so much, you are really leaving value on the table, and letting your work be less joyful than it ought to be.
Imagine This
Imagine a workspace that supports the work you set out to accomplish, minimizes distractions, allows for flexibility, and has every item in the right place. Imagine at each moment, having the tool available and in the condition it needs to be to do the work. Imagine never having to search for something. Always attending to the valuable part of your work, and not wasting time, energy, and thought on making up for a poorly attended workspace.
Sweep, Sort, and Standardize
As you imagined those joys, did it bring anything to mind that wasn’t that way? Do problems exist in your workspace? Have you ever considered what pieces of your work area contribute beneficially to your work, and which parts distract you?
Whether or not the answer is is yes, you will benefit from figuring out how to see the problems that exist in your workspace. It’s important to establish a pattern that lets you identify and fix those things on a regular basis.
Enter the idea of “3S”. This concept is a derivative of a lean manufacturing concept that has five components.
5S is essentially a workplace organization and productivity strategy. It gets junk out of the way, makes problems more visible, and keeps every needed tool nicely organized and within reach.
https://leansmarts.com/summary-2-second-lean/
Lean guru Paul Akers observed a company that had reduced that down to three components in a way that made it far easier to execute and make part of their culture. Once he saw it in action, he adopted the practice of 3S’ing, “Sweep, Sort, Standardize”.
“The purpose of 3S’ing is to find problems. You’re not cleaning the facility to keep it clean, that’s really the byproduct. You’re looking for problems.”
Paul Akers
3S’ing is for seeing problems
Paul Akers
If you’re like most people, even seeing the issues you’ve been living with and working around is a challenge. We get used to things being the way they are, good or bad. We don’t really realize why we’re putting things in certain places. When our tools are in an order that doesn’t support our work, it’s hard to recognize it because we establish workarounds that make things work. We just do’t see it.
It’s easy to imagine how to implement 3S practices in a manufacturing context. After a days work, tools tend to be out of place, artifacts of the process tend to be in various locations, and there tend to be ancillary things not necessary for the work. The raw materials are obvious. Where you store things has a direct impact on the flow of the work, and changing it can have visible impacts.
I want you to consider how this might be applicable in your work, which is likely not on a small-cell manufacturing floor like Paul Akers.
Here’s a description of how to do each piece of 3S:
Sweep
This means cleaning up your workspace. Removing trash, moving things back into place, identifying things that are broken or that need maintenance.
Sort
This means going through the elements of your workspace, and eliminating anything not necessary to the work. This tends to be clutter, cut-offs, paper, extra tools, books you’re not reading, etc.
Standardize
Take the time to establish patterns and standards for the processes involved in the work. This time tends to be spent identifying new processes that haven’t been standardized yet, or updating standards with new elements of the work process. Clean up file systems. Rearrange tools to a more fitting order. Find better ways to hold your tools in the right place. Re-evaluate where the raw materials belong (physically, or logically in a file system)
Abstraction and Application
At this point, we can get to the real fun: the exercise of sorting out the base concepts, and then applying them to your workspace.
How this looks for you will very widely. At some point I may be familiar enough to write out examples for lots of different jobs and workspaces.
Starting with what I know
I want to talk through my own workspace. I am a knowledge worker working on a computer to make my living. My workspace is a desk, computer, monitor, keyboard, pens, papers, kleenex, chair, drawers. I write software, which involves a whole suite of tools on the computer, and an organized file system. There are even sub-domains like my terminal set up, and the configuration and set up of my VM’s. I don’t have much dirt to sweep up. The physical mess I make is usually from food, papers I’ve written on, glassware, cords, batteries. In the digital world space is basically free and you can get away being a hoarder an no one would know. Files get stored, applications added, VMs, permissions, encryption, passwords, configurations, notes, addresses, etc. This is my small scale manufacturing cell.
How can I approach a 3S in a context like this?
What’s the desired outcome? Seeing problems.
Sweep
- Throw away trash
- Bring glassware to the break-room
- Log paper notes into appropriate digital format
- Put things back in their places.
Sort
- Review any old software applications, and remove any unnecessary ones.
- Review your visual controls, and remove unused ones.
- Reduce the number of mugs and such you keep at your desk to one.
Standardize
- Any new additions to the desk should have a specific place.
- Create documentation for any processes that are only in your head.
- Make decisions about what software you use to do things. Example is – where do you keep notes. Where you keep passwords. etc.
- Establish practices and standards around tasks you have on a regular basis. Create documentation, or visual controls.
- Review and establish daily routines for your flow of work. Where you get your work. How you document progress. How you finish.
- Improve any existing standards.
The point
The main point is that our workspaces can always use some attention. Every day we use them for their purposes, and every day our purposes might shift slightly. Taking the time to attend to your workspace on a daily basis will be rewarding and fun. I challenge you to sweep, sort and standardize daily to, clean up, think through your tools, and attend to things that need some change will give you a platform for your work that invigorates your strengths, and lets you attend to the important things without barriers.
I feel like there could be a whole treatise on lean as it applies to table tops, and places you can set “stuff”.
If I don’t stay intentional about what can be placed on an open surface, it fills with wasteful space-occupying objects.
I wonder if there is a lean principle dictating NOT having open counter space?
That’s an interesting thought. You don’t see much inter terms of open desk/counter space in a manufacturing context unless it’s for staging something in a process. I wonder if that is incidental, or if is intentional.
For computer work, I bet open desk space can also be functional, if it’s kept clear. I bet you’d just have to designate its purpose and then commit to that as a standard.