Some managers have to resort to public humiliation to get employees to submit their time sheets.

“Where is your time sheet?”

“I’ll get it to you.”

“But it was due two hours ago.’”

“Look, I’m really busy, okay, and I just don’t have time to figure out all that I did the past week.”

“Do you want to get paid?”

“Of course I do. Look  - I’ll get it to you … I just have to finish some things.”

Perhaps the single most annoying task for most workers is filling in their time sheet. Having worked for some of the largest consulting firms on earth, I have seen truly monstrous time tracking systems.  Painful, horrible, soul crushing, and pointless.

No one likes time sheets.

A recurring time sheet question goes something like this:

“Hey Jim, what did we do on Wednesday?  I’ve totally forgotten.”

Think about that. We blow through tasks so quickly that all too often what we’ve accomplished becomes a blur. We lose entire days, weeks, months of our lives to “work” we don’t even remember doing. I would call days you can’t remember waste.

How easy it would be to use a personal kanban and write the date of completion on each task when it’s done.  Place it in the “Timesheet” column.  At the end of the week, pick those tasks off the board, and record them.

Using a personal kanban for tracking those tasks:

• increases the accuracy of your time sheet,
• reduces the amount of time you spend completing the timesheet, and
• leaves you with a sense of accomplishment for actually having completed those tasks.

This transforms the time sheet into an opportunity for a quick retrospective. With the key word being quick.

Also consider: some tasks (like time sheets) seem like personal waste when they have no context. Sometimes you can mitigate waste by changing the context of the activity.

Photo cc. Charlee Brown

Waste should be discarded.

What is waste?

For personal kanban, the Five Somethings of Waste are:

1. Something that reduces your performance
2. Something someone else could do much more efficiently
3. Something that takes more time than its worth
4. Something that isn’t your strength
5. Something you don’t like or want to do

What can you do about it?

• Identify it
• Understand it
• Re-orient yourself to it
• Outsource it
• Delegate it
• Automate it
• Eliminate it

Well, that’s easy.  Except there needs to be a “how” part.

Identify It – Notice the Five Somethings as they occur.

Understand It – Watch for patterns in tasks that satisfy any of the “Five Somethings.”

Re-Orient Yourself To It – How do you and that piece of work relate to each other? Is it truly necessary? Do you have to do it? Can it be modified to not be waste?  What’s causing the waste? Can you do any of the following to it?

Outsource It - Contractors are everywhere. Use them.

Delegate It - Inside your team, find someone else who is better-suited.

Automate It - Spend some time making sure that a machine does it right, and never do it again.

Eliminate It - Find a way to never need to have that work done in the first place.

Your time is sacred, you only have a finite amount of it.  I am willing to pay bookkeepers to do even the smallest amount of work simply because I find bookkeeping a fate worse than death.  Other people pay me to do things they aren’t good at.  We all have our strengths and things that fulfill us. Let your personal kanban help you uncover the good, and get rid of the waste.

Photo by: Simen Svale Skogsr