How To See Into The Future And Reduce Work Waste

New York City has 3 days of food supplied.Outside of that, there's little food storage in the Big Apple.Toyota, Dell, and McDonald's use a similar system to get their products to consumers.This is called Just In Time inventory and it's saving a lot of time, dollars, and headache.The caveat is that you do have to know a bit about the demands that may or may not hit--but it's a very effective way to reduce waste.So New York City has enough "user data" to know that 3 days supply of food is a pretty good operating budget. It knows that it can ship food just as it's consumed and if they have 3 days of food in storage, they can also accommodate the fluctuations of the market demand.So what does this mean for your task load?

2 Minute Action

You probably need to know a little bit about what tasks are pending or incoming--but you probably don't need to see as far as you think into the future.The more you can honor a culture of "adapting to reality" instead of "sticking to the plan," the more likely you'll be resilient in uncertain environments.Of course, if you're working on a fixed scope project, this isn't as useful, but it does help protect against unforeseen events or abrupt crises.Take 2 minutes right now to plan out your 3 day supply of food for your team.The point isn't to get it perfect, it's just to get started. You don't need more than 2 minutes to get a rough draft.