Whether you're a business professional situated in an office or a print professional within a shop, workflow is something that is critical to both. How you do something, especially something that is repeated, significantly matters for several reasons. And understanding this is the first step towards improving and reaching the pinnacle of what you can be.
Let's first start off with what is a workflow? It's the process for how you do something. Sometimes it's a series of sequential tasks and other times it might include parallel ones. Depending upon the workflow and what needs to be accomplished, there might be only one way of performing the sequence but in other workflows there's room for adjusting the steps, their order or even the inputs.
As an example, let's take the workflow of waking up in the morning and getting ready for the day. There's of course waking up, maybe going to the bathroom, taking a shower, getting coffee, maybe breakfast, checking out the latest news, etc. Everyone is different and as such might have other things on their list or might have some of the items listed removed. When you start focusing on a workflow, you need to determine what you're trying to improve or maximize. In this example one might maximize for speed and how quickly you can get out the door while others might focus on kicking their day off to the best start, mood and demeanor. How you maximize for each of these distinctive goals, might be very different.
Let's zero in on simply waking up. Maybe you're the type of person that instantly wakes up, sometimes even moments before your alarm chimes. You jump out of bed and quickly move to the next thing to do in your morning. But there's others that might hit the snooze bar several times, linger in bed, and check the news out before they get up, etc. As I mentioned, everyone is different and will have their own preferences. But if you're trying to improve or maximize the workflow for a particular factor, you'll likely need to adjust the order, tasks performed and inputs to the tasks. Sometimes instead of big changes, you can simply tweak small aspects to find improvements. For the folks who prefer to linger in bed, but you're trying to maximize for speed to get to work, maybe you modify other parts of the workflow to accommodate. For instance instead of drinking coffee and eating breakfast at home, you take it for the road. In this manner you might be able to improve your morning routine, without making any huge sacrifices along the way.
And with all of this, we've just covered three of the most important topics when talking about workflows and improvements. The first is understanding that there is a workflow and beginning to decipher what it is. And the second is determining what to maximize for when seeking improvements. Finally, we briefly touched on modifying parts of the workflow to help reach your improvement goals. In future posts, we'll dive deeper to explore this topic further.