Find some red tape and eliminate it

Working with a government agency recently, we spent time on a ‘Red Tape Reduction’ session.

Red tape: those needless, time consuming activities.

Ask your customers and they'll have likely been frustrated or annoyed with something about your systems or how they interact with your product, business or people.

'Red tape'? It's thought to be based on the old practice of binding government documents with... red tape.

Frustration with red tape also comes from within the organisation too, from complicated or broken systems, time wasting forms, clunky websites.

Agreeing to go through a Red Tape Reduction session is a great thing to do! For many organisations this isn’t easy:

1. To agree to do it

2. To commit to being there in the session, identifying red tape, and then

3. To actually change things to remove the problem points.

That's because it’s way more exciting (and more rewarded via KPIs & targets) to work on new things, make new stuff and create new services.

What if at your next team meeting you just identified something that’s riddled with red tape and decided to eliminate the messy complications? You’d make things better for your customers, your colleagues ... and you.

You could be working too long and hard on that thing

You could be working too long and hard on that thing. 

True. Shocking but true.

Working too hard for too long can lead us to burnout. The World Health Organisation recently categorized, called out and flagged that burnout is an actual thing, not just a cliched word or simple behaviour that could be remedied if we’d only manage our time better.

So why are we burning out? We’re working too long and too hard on things. We're often striving for some unattainable perfection, trying to make something better or neater or prettier because it’s 'not good enough' yet.

But hello! Effort doesn’t equal reward. Well, not equally anyway.

> Because something was hard work doesn't make it good.

> Because it took a long time doesn't make it better.

> Because we worked on it for hours and hours doesn't make the quality better, or necessarily reflect better on us.

Our relationship to time, effort and our own activity is distorted. Stop burning yourself out and start trying some of the newer ways of thinking and working that involve working in increments and iterations, and allowing imperfections.

Are you working long and hard on something at the moment that could fall into this category?

Follow the law of forced efficiency

The incredibly successful Brian Tracy, who authored plenty of books and inspired many to greater things in their life, certainly inspired me in the earlier days of running my business.

I spied one of his books on the shelf of a local bookstore, I jumped at it and thought, ‘this will do; I won't have to read 100 books, I'll just read this one. It will be good enough.’ The book? ‘The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success.’ And the Law I love love love? It's # 15: The Law of Forced Efficiency.

It reads ‘The more things you have to do in a limited period of time, the more you will be forced to work on your most important tasks.’ It's just another way of saying ‘there is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important things.

As you take on more, you'll be forced to act with ‘maximum efficiency’. He continues: ‘If you are successful, you will almost always have too much to do and too little time.’ So ask: what is the most valuable use of my time right now?

And for you? What is the most valuable use of your time right now? I'd love to hear your thoughts.