Use forcing functions to craft a more productive work environment

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I’m not a very disciplined person. But the changes I’ve made since starting my new job reveals a clear pattern: They all reinforce discipline, order and professionalism.

Why do I put so much effort into creating a disciplined work environment? Because I’ve had 41 years to understand myself and other people.

I’ve realized everyone struggles with this stuff. And as much as we should work on ourselves, we also need to work on our environment. It’s much easier to swim downstream than upstream.

20 years of leadership has taught me that the more disciplined our environment is, the less disciplined we need to be. But how do we craft an environment like that? One tool is FORCING FUNCTIONS.

For example: I realized our teams were pretty good at asking vendors for Incident Reports. But we were equally good at losing track of them!

So we created a simple REQUESTED > RECEIVED > REVIEWED planner board. Alas. We’ve simply moved the problem. Maintaining this board also requires discipline!

So we put a standing item on our Brains Trust agenda and quickly go through it every week. This is our forcing function.

Its a standing item so we can’t forget. Focusing on it for 5 minutes means we don’t have to worry about it for the other 10,000 minutes of the week.