What Bugs Me?

In the book 2 Second Lean by Paul A. Akers (a free book), he talks about look around and seeing what bugs you. Once you identify what bugs you (the problem), then you can begin to look at solutions.

I recently tried to apply this to my life and began with my office/craft room. What was bugging me about it? The main thing was that I couldn’t find the books I wanted to look at and I could find the yarn that I wanted when I wanted to make something.

My problem was figuring out where to begin.

I started from my goal and worked backwards to my starting point.

To find my yarn, I needed to organize my yarn by color and wieight.
To organize my yarn, I needed to get the books and other things off of my yarn shelves.
To get the things off of my yarn shelves, I needed to add more bookshelves.
To add more bookshelves, I needed to go to Lowes and get the shelves.

So, the first thing I did was get the bookshelves.
To add the shelves, I had to take down the books that were stacked up on the shelves that were already there.
Once I started taking the books off, I realized that I didn’t want to keep all of the books that I’d taken down.
After sorting through the books and adding the shelves, I had a lot more room for the things that were on my yarn shelves.
I organized the books and loaded them onto the bookshelves.
Once I did that, I had plenty of empty cubicles on my yarn shelves.
I sorted my yarn by color and weight. I found yarn that I didn’t remember that I had.

Now I’m motivated to make some many new things and read some of the books that I had rediscovered.

Working backwards in my mind helped me figure out a starting point.

I tend to figure out my lessons in the same way. I think about my goal – the ending point. Where do I want my students to end up? Then I work backwards from there and try to figure out the skills they need to get to the ending point.

What bugs you? How can you work to fix the problem? Please share.

Photo by Gabriel Manlake on Unsplash

Lean Culture

A friend recently told me about the Lean Culture in the manufacturing field. I watched a video called Lean Manufacturing - Lean is Simple by FastCap and it gave a good explanation of the principles. There are eight wastes that are examined in the culture. I began to look at these eight wastes and wondered how it could be applied to field of education.

Here are the 8 wastes that we will look at:

1. Overproduction

2. Transportation

3. Excess Inventory

4. Defects

5. Over-process

6. Wasted motion

7. Customers waiting time

8. Unused employee potential

Finding the waste component can really make a difference in any field if you look hard enough. Making changes can impact the final goal.

In a classroom, students can help look for wastes and probably would enjoy pointing them out.

Students might also have a different perspective than a teacher amd be able to point out things that a teacher might not see.

In the following posts, I hope to examine each of these wastes and try to look for ways that schools and teachers have too much waste. As a taxpayer, I would be interested in looking at ways to reduce waste and get more bang for my money.

Feel free to jump in and share ways you see waste in your school community. We might have a common issue that has been overlooked.

Photo by Tom Morel on Unsplash