There’s a great anecdote in Chuck and Dan Heath’s book Decisive, about the commanding officer of a ship in the US Navy who “declares war on ‘List B’.”
“List B” comprises the dreary, repetitive, but necessary tasks that sailors spent so much time on, such as painting (and repainting) the ship. The officer observed that List B tasks had a huge impact on sailors’ morale and overall enjoyment of their work.
Given that, he wondered: Was it possible to eliminate those tasks altogether?
The Heath brothers go on to describe how the office methodically and thoughtfully analyzed each task and sought out ways to eliminate or at least minimize the tasks of List B.
After reading this anecdote, I began to ask the same question about my own work. What does my List B look like? What are those dreary tasks that I find myself doing over and over again, sucking time out of my day and enjoyment from my job?
Here are some tasks I came up with:
- Laying out proposal content in InDesign
- Creating PowerPoint slides for interviews
- Requesting proposal content from subconsultants
- Searching for project data
- Scheduling meetings
With several tasks identified, I was ready—to borrow the words of that commanding officer—to declare war on List B.
The next question: How can I eliminate or significantly modify those tasks so that they are either more enjoyable or take less time, while not sacrificing the quality of my work?
One strategy to combat two of those items—”laying out proposal content in InDesign” and “creating PowerPoint slides for interviews”—was to stop reinventing the wheel. Too often, I find myself up against a deadline and needing, say, a page that outlines my firm’s design philosophy regarding sustainability. This situation sends me on a shakedown of my marketing “content library,” which is typically followed by a manic hunt through previous submissions to find that layout I vaguely remembered doing several months prior.
All in all, a poor workflow. And the sad part? I hated doing it, but I kept doing it anyway. Because, despite their dreary, repetitive nature, List B tasks have a secret weapon: inertia.
It’s not easy to defeat inertia. It’s much easier to just allow the momentum to carry you through the tasks, no matter how awful they are. That wild goose chase for the right sustainability layout I described above? Even though it was a pain in the ass, that chase was at least familiar, and that familiarity had over time bred a sort of strange comfort. I knew, at least, what I could expect in the teeth-gritting process of completing a proposal layout.
The difficulty was that I needed to be my own commanding officer. It was easy enough for the officer to identify List B tasks and then set to work eliminating them; he had no sense of inertia about the tasks. He had fresh eyes when it came to the stultifying work of repainting the ship.
The challenge that faced me (and is facing me still! I’m still fighting battles against those List B tasks) is that I needed to separate myself from myself, and serve as my own commanding officer.
Taylor Coe 