Habit #3 - Put First things First
Last month, in our second habit: Begin with the end in mind - we spoke about planning to get your desired results. This month, in our third habit: Put first things first – we look at prioritising day-to-day actions based on what is most important, not what is most urgent.
Put first things first is about prioritisation, what is important to your goals. We find ourselves reacting to urgent matters, but this can mean we spend our time doing things that, whilst urgent, are not important. The consequence of this is that we often neglect things that are not urgent but are critically important. It is these non-urgent, important tasks, that enable us to plan for the future, work on root cause and effect and prevent those time-consuming urgent matters from happening in the first place. Sometimes this means doing things we don’t like doing and making sure we don’t get distracted with meaningless tasks that are both unimportant and non-urgent. Remember, sometimes the best answer is no!
" Is this the most urgent thing on your plate? Maybe not, is it most important? Absolutely! "
Low effort, high impact
Putting first things first sounds like an obvious thing to do. This is more about understanding what we put first. In collision repair, we can get lost focusing on reducing cost in areas that have little impact but are high in the effort. For example: if we look at the paint and material’s, we can fall into a cycle where we lock these critical products away to prevent them from getting wasted or squandered, with the intention of giving us better cost control. This however can mean that a skilled technician must spend time finding the key holder or the controller, and once they have found them only retrieving the amount of material that is allowed (one roll of masking tape, three sanding discs etc.) and then spend more time returning the keys to the holder/controller. This process is repeated by all technicians using materials, a number of times per day/week and month. And yes, this may appear to reduce material waste but at what cost? Skilled technicians are a significant cost to any collision shop, and this process of locking up inventory means they are wasting this high-cost skilled labour time to save low-cost small amounts of materials.
Optimisation
So, putting first things first, we need to focus on the optimisation of labour, as this important area is where we will see the largest gains. Focus on removing as many obstacles as possible to keep skilled technicians working on the repair, producing and selling valuable hours. Allow technicians to have all they need (materials, tools and equipment) at arm’s reach wherever possible. Every minute that your technician is away from a repair is wasted labour selling opportunities, obviously, we will always have what is known as strategic waste, these are actions a technician will need to do that is not actually working on the vehicle, like moving vehicles in and out of bays or the workshop, but we need to organise the situation to reduce this where possible.
Is this the most urgent thing on your plate? Maybe not, is it most important? Absolutely.