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The Kaizen approach (Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the better”) is a philosophy for daily, incremental, improvement.
The Kaizen approach was first brought into Japanese businesses after the second world war by the Americans. The idea is to improve process and quality management by eliminating waste, thus improving time management.
In Japanese companies that use the Kaizen principles, it is the responsibility of all employees, from the top to the very bottom, to look at their daily tasks and think of ideas to improve them. And this process is ongoing, because improvement is constant and ongoing.
By making the improvement constant and ongoing it also makes it easier to achieve.
Imagine you had broken your leg and after spending some time incapacitated, you wanted to get your health & fitness back.
Your physiotherapist recommends that you walk 4 miles a day, for a person of average fitness this would take 1 hour. After your first attempt your time is 1 hour 40 minutes, with you feeling dog tired and your leg aching. You want to get to an average standard for a charity walk you wish to do in 4 months time.
To achieve the standard in just 4 months seems like a daunting task. But by making the targets smaller, 10 minutes per month, which means 20 seconds a day, over a 30 day month. Because the improvement is constant and ongoing the goal appears more achievable and you are easily able to measure your progress.
Think of a task that you know you should be doing but keep putting off.
- The first step is the most important, so commit just 10 minutes to get the task started, once you start it is easier to keep the momentum going.
- Break the task down into manageable chunks, don’t look at it as a whole, that way it is less daunting.
- Bring some fun into it, put some music on, give yourself a ten minute time scale and a target. Then you have something to measure against for the next ten minutes.
- Every 30 minutes, momentarily step away from the task, ask yourself how you could improve what your doing.
- Keep the end result in mind, it is important not to lose track of what you set out to achieve in the first place.
Remember that Kaizen is all about the improvement process. So whatever you’re doing keep an open mind about how you can improve the task
