…for the next installment in our “plain english guide” series, we’ve decided to break down the key concepts of lean manufacturing, Six Sigma and flexible manufacturing. While we couldn’t cover every concept – a Google search for “lean manufacturing glossary” should satisfy most pedants – we have reviewed the important terms. Leave a comment below if there are others you’d like us to explain. Let’s get started.
Basically, modern manufacturing methods boil down to three key concepts:
* Reduce waste - reduce the amount of materials, capacity and manpower wasted in the process by producing just enough product to meet current demand
* Maintain quality – devise more effective manufacturing methods in order to continue making quality products despite strict reductions of waste
* Accelerate production – decrease the amount of time needed to manufacture product, making up for the lack of surplus
If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/27g9rot. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen
Facebook was born to capture the social or off hours parts of school. Blogs are increasingly becoming a platform that functions as a springboard for product launches, paid membership communities and a tour on the speaking circuit — preferably with one’s own flavor of a program.
How much critical thinking is being developed racing to the popularity charts?
Learning is one of the ways in which the Internet is allowing more people to participate in the global economy, in addition to the conversation. And it’s giving creators and teachers the ability to build a platform to share what they know and attract students. A much improved — and needed — proposition.
Who says you have to give up being social to learn online? Why should you be able to learn only by paying top dollars?
You’re already familiar with TED. They make the talks people pay top dollar to attend available online for free — through a sponsorship model. There are more free resources out there for those who wish to learn and teach. Here are 3.
If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/y4jjcl3. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen
This is the final post in this weeks’ Periodic Review series. It is inspired as my own productivity practice has evolved quite a bit over the past two years, since I have been writing about Getting Things Done and other workflow systems.
In the previous posts we looked at how to manage your Periodic Reviews, starting with a high level of granularity and developing a personal method that works well for you.
In this post I am going to show you some of the tools that I use to manage my workflow.
I have tried and evaluated many different tools and applications, and changed everything more than once. Here are some things that I have learned about myself via this process:
If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/cxpgcc. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen
This is a collaborative post from yours truly and @emilyrobe, a Twitter friend of mine:
Just before Christmas I was ill with a virus that took about 20 days to clear off. After that I found myself in what I term a ‘funk’, one of those unmotivated, apathetic moods that drive you insane because you want to work, you just can’t find the energy!
I twitted this out looking for reactions and had a few great suggestions, to do lists, order ranking, people recommended systems for me to look at or resources to read. None of them had hit the spot though. What had put me in this ‘funk’?
My head was so busy with ‘noise’ that I couldn’t think straight and I felt very isolated. There was no creativity or clarity that I could pull on, lists weren’t helping! I needed to clear some space so I could think straight and ping!, there was my light-bulb moment. Space!
I work from home, I’m a busy mum of three, wife and virtual assistant, I’d been ill and my ‘space’ was cluttered. I’d got used to having my laptop on my knee whilst I wasn’t working and had broken the habit of working at my desk, which had become cluttered, in fact the whole house was cluttered.
Having identified the source of frustration and spending time eliminating some of it, my mood lifted somewhat, cleaning up released some of that blocked energy, standing back and noting the small achievements of a clean house and a tidy desk made me realise how seemingly small inconsequential things can make us unproductive.
My good working habits had been broken by illness and I had fallen into the trap of trying to work where there are distractions, ie on the sofa or dining table, the noisiest and busiest places in my home! Once those areas had been reclaimed and the clutter eliminated, I felt much more like working and the ‘funk’ had gone.
I was in a similar “funk” at the same time, and we tweeted back-and-forth about it. I was not sick but we had been doing a lot of traveling and my to-do list was being neglected. My own problem was clutter in my mind and in my scattered lists of things to do.
Unfortunately my newly-mobile lifestyle had not yet been fully organized. Living out of suitcases for 3 months is no easy task, and I finally decided that I needed a new system to capture and track my Next Actions. So I did what everyone should do, and went to look for help in the Work.Life.Creativity forum. We have a topic there called Working the List that was a big help, with ideas on how to capture, organize and prioritize the Next Actions.
What a relief! I did a mind dump last night, writing down every possible thing that I could think of that needed doing and then organized them into a set of lists based on my new Contexts and situation. The new context list looks like this:
Calls Track in my Calendar
Errands Track in my hPDA
Book Candidates Track in my Capture Notebook
Writing Track in the Lists Notebook
Computer Track in the Lists Notebook
Agendas Track in the Lists Notebook
Read/Review Track in the Lists Notebook
Reflecting Track in the Lists Notebook
The first three items have been tracked in those tools for some time now so I am comfortable using them and in knowing where to look for them. The new piece of the puzzle is the Lists Notebook.
Once I had organized the various tasks and Next Actions, it was a simple matter to number the pages in the notebook (right-hand only, 1-96) and then break it up into sections. The blank Index page shown in the pic has been labeled and detailed as to which sort of things go where.
What a relief to have this all done! I slept better last night than I have in a while, and didn’t have to worry about anything nagging me from the back of my mind.
What sort of tools do you use for tracking your lists? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.
If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/a9uscv. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen
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July 28th, 2010 by Stephen
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This is the final post in this weeks’ 
