Don't Get Stuck In Your Processes
Try something different now and then...
It’s good to have workflow processes that get the job done, but never let them blind you to better possibilities.
I recently had a hard-drive failure and while I didn’t lose any data, I did lose a host of my personal settings in the subsequent restoration. I had to redo my mouse-focus settings, reassign all of my hotkeys, correct my date settings to be ISO 8601-compliant, and all the other routine tasks. Other than the concern that there was some efficiency tweak that I’d forgotten about and was slowing me down in its absence, the most frustrating part was that familiar sense of wrongness that always happens after switching to a new workstation. Like getting a new suit that theoretically is the same as your old favorite, but it feels very slightly off. It may be something with the fabric, or the tailor was off by a few millimeters somewhere, or very possibly it’s all in your head.
But, as we all know on some level, that sense of wrongness can often just be you breaking out of a rut. In their 2014 book, How Google Works (affiliate link), Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg write about how in an organization, processes are crucial. In order to scale any organization, you need to reduce them to a set of specific documented steps, to handle things consistently and efficiently. However, as Schmidt and Rosenberg write, being too reliant on processes can cause people to “lose muscle memory.” They start relying on the momentum of the process rather than their own intuition.
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Watching Your Personal Processes
The same is true of people, with their own personal processes. Everyone needs a routine. If every morning you wake up, look at a subway map, and decide from scratch the best way to get to the office, you’re wasting a lot of time. But it’s also all too easy to fall into too much of a routine. For commuting in particular, studies have shown that simply changing the way you go to work in the morning can improve cognitive performance. And more obviously, you may find that there’s a better route you hadn’t thought of.
What is true of commutes, of course, is also true in the office. It’s very easy to fall into a routine even for very basic tasks, like how you open and organize windows, how your mouse is configured, all the little quirks in how you handle emails. Just like Google’s corporate processes or your commute, it’s essential to have these routines. But it’s equally essential to not calcify into your routines, and to reexamine them occasionally to see if there’s a better route that never occurred to you before.
Reexamining Your Routines
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All of your routines can benefit from reexamining. Email is a great example. There are countless ways to organize the dozens or even hundreds of emails that busy lawyers like my colleagues and I receive each day. From broad issues like whether or not (or how strictly) to follow inbox zero to foldering methods, to the specifics like what names to use for folders, there are millions of potential variations to follow.
And all of these changes can make small differences: a shorter folder name may allow you to parse through the list quicker, or have a more positive association that makes you work more efficiently. For instance, if “To Do” makes you slightly anxious at the prospect of things piling up, “Pending” may be a better choice for you. Even the level of detail in your procedure is an important decision, and a personal one. Some people, like Marc Andreessen, find it best to follow carefully designed systems. Others find such systems unproductive, taking up too much time to follow and set up, and may benefit from simply leaving all their emails in their inbox and winging it.
But no matter what you’re currently doing for email, it’s highly unlikely that — out of millions of potential systems — you’re currently using the one that’s best for you. Expanding this past email to all of your routines, there are nearly an infinite number of ways you could be doing things better.
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For many people, the inertia, sunk costs, endowment effect, and other reasons keep them from changing their processes as much as they should. Or simply the prospect of trying to figure out what a better system would be stops them in their tracks. But often the best approach is just to throw out your current routine and start over. Try something new; if it works, great, and then you can refine it as necessary. If it doesn’t work out, maybe you’ll get some ideas from it of how to do better, or at the very least you got your mind a little bit out of a rut.
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So my advice is to start today and switch up one of your personal processes, even if it’s something small, or even just your commute. You might stumble upon a better way to get things done.
Matthew W. Schmidt has represented and counseled clients at all stages of litigation and in numerous matters including insider trading, fiduciary duty, antitrust law, and civil RICO. He is of counsel at the trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at matthew.w.schmidt@balestrierefariello.com.
