Count the minutes you spend looking for information you already have

A customer calls and asks what rate we gave him in March.

Somebody opens the sheet. It is not there, so they check the other sheet. Then they scroll the WhatsApp chat. Then they ask the person who handled it, who is out. Eleven minutes later there is an answer, and it is roughly right.

That happened four times today and nobody wrote any of it down.

Why searching never gets counted

Because it feels like working. The person is at their desk, concentrating, dealing with a customer request. Nobody looks at that and thinks waste.

But nothing was produced. At the end of eleven minutes the business knew exactly what it knew at the start. The only thing that changed is that eleven minutes are gone, and the customer waited.

It is also the cost that grows fastest. Two years of records is harder to search than one, so the better your business does, the worse this gets.

The exercise

For one week, put a sheet on the wall. Every time somebody has to look for something that already exists, they put a mark and write what they were looking for. Nothing else.

At the end of the week count the marks and read the list. You will see the same four or five things over and over. Last rate for this party. Whether that bill was paid. What was promised on delivery. Whose job this was.

That short list is the whole brief. Those four or five things need to be somewhere anybody can find in five seconds, and the rest can stay exactly where it is.

Most people expect this exercise to produce a long list. It almost never does.

Put the sheet up tomorrow. By Friday, what are the five things your office keeps hunting for?

Those four or five things are exactly what we put within five seconds of anybody who needs them. Send us your list from the week and we will tell you what it would take.