Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you every week by Linda Hill. Check out her blog for the rules and the contribution of other bloggers.
This week’s prompt:
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “list.” Make or talk about a list. Enjoy!!
I once worked for a major health insurance company handling all the data communications for the organization. They spent a good deal of money trying to streamline productivity. Efficiency was the golden ring.
We had an external company come in and spend months tracking the workflow of every document in the company. It was called Business Process Improvement. The walls of the building were covered with huge sheets of brown butcher paper – lists in black sharpie showing every department and every person that touched every document in the company. Fun times let me tell you.
After that we were tasked to keep a time sheet of every minute we spent during the day. Another long list.
- 8:00 – 8:05 Phone Call
- 8:05 – 8:30 Staff Meeting
- 8:30 – 9:00 Authorizing Invoices
- 9:00 – 9:10 Cafeteria for Coffee
You get the gist. People worried about their jobs – being ‘right-sized’ was a thing then. Funny thing was, we were not allowed to list how much time we spent making the list.
Then all the members of the management team were required to attend an organization workshop. This was part of the ‘clean desk era’. The idea of the workshop was that you only had one project visible on your desk at a time – and all of the associated paperwork contained in one small folder. At the end of the day, the goal was to have only one piece of paper on your desk – a list of tasks. Definitely not my stye. I prefer the ‘everything within an arms reach’ approach. Organized in folders, but all on my desk. I despised trying to pull folders in and out of my desk drawers all day to work on the crisis of the moment.
Now that I am retired, I don’t make many lists. I make lists for the grocery store, or I make lists for tools and materials I need to order and that’s about it. I keep all the tasks I need to accomplish right upstairs in the ole’ noggin.
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