Welcome to my first blog and thank you for logging on! The professional skill I have chosen to expand my knowledge on, as well as yours, is efficiency. When I was a junior in high school, my math teacher, who would eventually become my favorite teacher of all time, introduced us to the philosophy of “Work smarter, not harder”. He never gave unnecessary homework, never felt the need to take class all the way to the bell if he didn’t need to, and was always willing to work one-on-one with us. That’s a way of learning that gets so lost now. Ninety-nine percent of teachers don’t care if you learn the material or not, they’re just teaching to cram all the material for the test that they already made. Actually understanding something and doing it right the first time is a lost art.
The philosophy of “Work smarter, not harder” applies to every profession out there. People are too concerned with “getting their hours in” and “looking busy” that they just run around in circles all day so co-workers don’t call them lazy. Mostly everything in life is based on a time. Job estimates, paychecks, car maintenance and even classes. If everyone was paid by the job or activity that they were undertaking, instead of an hourly estimate or rate, so much more work would get done.
We are conditioned to not be efficient; whether it be our minimum weekly hours, our learning plan, or the amount of sleep we get. There are so many reason we choose to stretch our work out over more time than we know we could accomplish it in and we are all guilty of it.
I have been interested in Sig Sigma training for quite some time now. For those of you that don’t know, Six Sigma is a professional certification that is held in very high regards. “Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving toward six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process — from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service.” These certifications and practices are aimed to basically minimize down time and increase efficiency. There are used universally in every type of business, and it is a formidable recognition to have in your wheelhouse.
