Woodworking Network: As you’re turning off the lights and shutting everything down at the end of the day, you see your finished product sitting by the shipping door. You look at it and think to yourself, “It’s five pieces of wood put together into a box with two doors on it, how could this possibly take so long?”
12 comments:
Yes! This has been a such a rude awakening for me. I often feel as though tasks can be done so much more quickly than they end up being done. And for the past 3 weeks, I've been that person who has found myself at the end of the night wondering how could this one thing have taken so long... but as the article mentioned, there are hidden aspects that we forget to factor in when we think about accomplishing tasks. Coordination being one of them... I'm not sure how helpful those tips can be in a theatrical setting. However, it goes without saying that training/experience would lead to better coordination and cut down on time spent negatively. In addition to this, when I read the title of the article, i think about how hard it can be to even schedule and coordinate times. That alone is a task...
This article is written with carpentry and physical projects in mind but I think that the concepts actually apply to any project or process. I have the same feelings as this author at the end of most of my days. How did I only get this much done? Where did all of the time go? Was I not efficient enough? A lot of these thoughts come when I am looking at my checklist that I had made for my day. Often times though, to make myself feel better, I will remember to list off all of the things that I accomplished that weren’t on my original to due list. That’s where I have to realize that all of those things got done too and that’s where all of my time went and I still accomplished tasks on top of those. I think that is an example of measuring progress. We want all of our information up front but sometimes we don’t have that luxury, sometimes we have to put a lot more effort into inquiring about that information.
From a first year's perspective in the School of Drama, this seems to be something our shop does very well. It seems everything needed is always on hand, what is being done is always planned out, everything is standardized (as much as it can be in theatre), and we are all trained very well due to the “mini” and “local” system. From my minimal knowledge it seems like cut lists and materials lists are what our “information up front” is. I know for my own personal projects it can be hard to estimate time, and how much time a project will take, and I think to some degree this article is a little misleading, however it has been very interesting and informative. I think to summarise it, the point is to say that before doing work, one should try to plan out what you need, what to order, and how to go about doing it as much as possible.
A paragraph into this article, Brad Cairns states that he has “come to believe that it’s far more difficult to coordinate the building of products than it is to actually build them”. He illustrates how this idea is present and applicable to home construction and carpentry, before giving a detailed breakdown of how to manage coordination and proactivity prior to building something for a customer. A lot of his tips are applicable to parts of life outside of construction however, for example getting as much information as possible right away and simplifying certain concepts. Coordination is built and strengthened by understanding, and oftentimes people overthink and over-complicate a task to the point where coordination is marred and weakened. So Cairn’s point that gathering knowledge immediately and simplification of particularly complex subjects is quite insightful; it’s even worth looking at how these practices can be applied to my personal academic life.
This is a really relatable article to most (if not all) of the departments in the school of drama. We can’t approach doing anything without formal and extensive planning ahead of time. Even with the planning, people and equipment are not perfect and something is guaranteed to go wrong at some point in the process. It is best to be prepared for exactly those sorts of things. Being prepared and documented with all of your work for a show is so important to getting things done on time. Deadlines in theatre are some of the most strict deadlines in general overall. The show opens on the day that it opens and it has to be ready by then. While this article is not directly theatre related, it is certainly something that we deal with in every capacity of the show. I am working on a show right now for lighting and I am working on getting as much done early so that I will be prepared come cueing and tech.
Brad Cairns's ideas on cabinetry are highly applicable to the TD profession, and honestly most technical departments in theatre as a whole. The idea of getting organized before 'doing the thing' is a strong lesson in the Stage Management world, and is a topic we've gone into through the reading of the Checklist Manifesto. My general take from that source and this article is this: you're not going to remember everything, even if you think you will, so just write it down. There's no shame in having reminders for tasks you've completed hundreds or thousands of times, because you will always have the chance to get it wrong sometimes. Also, the ideas in Cairns's section about Training were particularly interesting, because we often do feel like we're repeating ourselves in the workplace or on a project (especially with institutional knowledge about Purnell that we're all expected to have, but end up asking questions on constantly).
I think the basic idea in this article, that the complexity of projects causes them to take longer and be more difficult than the sum of the individual tasks, is pretty obvious and we all know it. Knowing it, though, is different than feeling it intuitively, and a lot of us are still frequently surprised by how long things take. This article makes a compelling case that standardization is a key to effectively executing complex projects, and I agree. Often we like to think that our jobs are too complicated to be reduced to standardized processes or checklists, and that’s true, but standardizing standard parts of those complicated jobs is key to freeing up our attention to focus on the problems that require creative solutions. We’re good at figuring out problems and adapting to circumstances. What we’re bad at is doing the same medium complexity task the same way every time. We should standardize those processes and implement checklists.
I do think that this person is on the right path but 4 really just didn't ring true for me. While it is important to check oneself against a calendar and against daily goals I think the way he explained it went a little too far and into the micro-management side of his desires. And maybe that's just hyperbole for the sake of the article, but I do think you start to get diminishing returns if you are breathing down employee necks too hard. A manager has more important things to do and if your onboarding and documentation in step 3 was solid enough then you shouldn't have need for number 4 unless you aren't hitting your goals for some reason, at which point a closer eye is a good idea so you can figure out where in your process you need to make the necessary changes.
Overall I really liked the article though, I agree that a strong onboarding process with adequate training is important for any strong production effort.
This article wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, I was more imagining some insight into management vs. being on the shop floor. They make some really good points about streamlining processes though. The last one they mention is interesting and it’s the idea of training. Many workplaces have training in place and it’s obviously a very careful balance because if you spend too much time training, then you’re not saving any time or making a better product comparable to how much time you spent training. This is especially true because it costs money to send people to training because if your job requires it, you have to be paid for it. Simplifying your purchasing is an important part because if everything can easily get funneled through a purchasing person, process, or document, people on the floor spend less time on hold with vendors and trying to figure out where their stuff is.
I have been struggling in my head with this concept of, “why is this taking you so long, it is not that hard” over the last couple of weeks. Many of the tasks I have been completing at CMU shouldn’t be that hard I have been doing them for years. So I find that I am beating myself up for not completing these tasks fast enough or to a high enough standard. I need to take a step back and remember that I am in a new environment and my mental health is not at its highest. And so I need to give myself grace. This article gave me tips to remember when moving forward on projects that should be easy for me. For example, having information about projects conceived upfront of a project that way I can move forward without having to worry something might go wrong. Overall, this article reminded me that I am human and sometimes life is hard and gets in the way of tasks that should be second nature.
One of the things that I did learn the hard way was in step 4, measuring. Making sure I know not only the measurements, but double checking that they add up and if the project is multiple pieces diagramming out how they will fit and what each will look like, not just the measurements to prevent any nasty surprises or mistakes in the middle of the process. This article also reminded me of how important experience is in planning. No matter the effort, if I have no or almost no experience working on a project I won’t know how or what to plan for. When the article talked about training taking up time it made me think about the way resources, time and money especially, can cut down first on training or in my experience safety when we need to move quicker or be more productive. Even that harsh deadline of opening night on a show can put us into a mindset where we need to get things onstage rather than them being done healthily or ideally.
These five coordination tips from Brad are very helpful. They are things I certainly thing about as a manager (a term I believe goes hand in hand with Coordination), but it is great to review and reaffirm their importance. Of course, you can build a cabinet faster than the factory because in your mind as a professional you aren’t thinking about set up time, you’re thinking about a timer set as you begin racing the clock. This leaves out communication, purchasing, document creation for repetition, as well as training other for repetition. I think the major point here is that as a manager or coordinator you shouldn’t be “doing” a lot, you are facilitating others doing the labor. This is naturally a more complicated process because you are working in a team of people who all need information instead of singularly on a task alone. This was a very simple article but somewhat useful.
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