The Four "E's"
Picture this: you are an account supervisor (sounds generic enough) at a company. A new guy, Rich, gets hired to work in your department doing the same thing you do.
After a few months, you realize that Rich is not only getting his workload completed before it is due, but he’s also really good at it! You also notice that Rich doesn’t work at a feverish pace (like you) and he has time to take breaks and even chat with coworkers. Then your boss takes notice and commends Rich on his great work.
What gives?
How is it that you work so hard and Rich seems to just breeze by? You sit near him, you know he’s doing the work (not farming it out to India), and still, it doesn’t seem possible that he can crank out great work in less time. It doesn’t seem fair.
Here are some things Rich’s coworkers may say either to him or about him:
Must be nice to have the time to do what he does. I’m just too busy!
He’s just a natural. It comes easy to him.
I bet he made a deal with the manager to do less work.
Management just likes him because he’s all happy-go-lucky.
He’s sucking up to the boss. Brown noser!
He can’t keep it up forever. He’s going to burn out.
None of the above are true. Yet, they may seem true to those who utter them. How is that?
In our fictional example, Rich is using, what I call “The Four E’s”:
Effective
Efficient
Excellent
Enduring
These are stacked upon each other in succession; meaning that Number One comes before two without discontinuing Number One. And so on to Number Four. In essence, it’s a form of Kaizen - nothing groundbreaking, but valuable nonetheless.
Since everyone’s workplace and workload are different, let’s use a common task to illustrate: cleaning the bathroom at home. Yay.
Now, it may seem silly to apply this system to something as seemingly marginal as cleaning a bathroom but, believe me, it works. I do it! After all, I came up with The Four E’s, I apply it to virtually everything I do! Am I saying I’m Rich in the story? Yes. But I couldn’t just use the name “Jason.” I mean, what would people think???
In any case, let’s get back to the bathroom.
Most people clean their bathroom by going into it and asking, “What looks dirty?” They soon find out that everything is dirty. So they go rummage around the house for cleaners and something to scrub with, maybe even grabbing the disinfecting wipes, thinking that this is a nice shortcut.
Then they wonder, what do I clean first if everything is dirty? You can see where this is going - a haphazard method of trying to wipe down and scrub different things. The end result is either a clean bathroom after a long and arduous effort (a little over an hour), or a somewhat less dirty bathroom after a shorter, less arduous effort (about 30 minutes). The person puts the cleansers away and leaves with a tinge of dread for the next time the task must be performed.
Here’s how The Four E’s revolutionizes this task.
Effective
This simply means that the end product will be up to par. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it can’t be the quick and easy way, leaving things undone. Not fun, but it has to be satisfactory in order to improve upon it. I’ve heard folks use the Spanish phrase “moda floja” to describe work done in a quick and lazy way. It means just that, the lazy way. That is not effective.
How do we do the job effectively if we don’t know how to do it in the first place? The answer for each of these steps is the same for the overall process: do, review, iterate.
The excuse, “No one ever showed me how” holds no water. If we don’t know how to do something, we can ask someone. If there isn’t anyone who knows, we can read a book at the library. These days, there’s a YouTube video for anything we want to learn how to do.
To be effective (i.e., to do the job right), all we have to do is earnestly desire to do the job correctly and a little bit of elbow grease to get it done. It’s that simple.
At this point, let’s say the task still takes a little over an hour.
Efficiency
Now that we know how to do the job to satisfaction, we can find ways to do it more efficiently. Again, each of these steps takes repetition. “But I don’t want to have to do something over and over again, I just want to know how to do it quick and easy.” Tough. There are too many variables in life, too many different things that need to be done and accomplished. Unless we have an underlying method to apply to different tasks, we’ll constantly be searching for shortcuts everywhere which, as I mentioned before, leads to wasted time and effort. Repetition takes grit, but it works.
“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.” - Zig Zigler
Carrying on with the example, each time we clean the bathroom (correctly), we can look for ways to do it a little quicker. We can gather the cleansers and place them in one easy-to-find spot (under the bathroom sink perhaps?). The next time we clean, we’ve shaved off a few minutes of searching for cleansers. Then we look for something else to do to increase efficiency. And repeat. Each time, we’re increasing efficiency without sacrificing efficacy.
Excellence
There comes a point where you can only be so efficient with a task. We’re cleaning the bathroom effectively yet we simply cannot do it any faster than, say, 30 minutes. At this point, it is time to focus on excellence.
Which cleansers work best? Which scrubbers work best? What sequence of tasks produces the cleanest bathroom? What methods of scrubbing yield the best results?
This, of course, can take some research outside of the actual task. To some, this is adding unnecessary time and effort. Yet, this research doesn’t have to be extensive and, better yet, it really only has to be a few minutes of looking up stuff online. This is more fun than it seems. The review section for any product usually has a few outrageous or funny gems, Amazon and YouTube are treasure troves!
This step is really the heart of any task done well. The prophet Daniel in the Bible is known to have a spirit of excellence. I take that to mean he strove to be excellent in all his thoughts and actions. When you take on a spirit of excellence, you’ll automatically desire to do things better. It becomes woven into your being.
Enduring
This last “E” is a bit tricky. What we’re going for here is to ensure the method can be repeated over and over again. You may be thinking that, since we’ve made it effective, efficient, and excellent, that should be enough. I don’t disagree. Yet, I’ve found that that making something enduring helps to keep good habits continuing across the board.
Here are a few ideas to make a task enduring:
Scheduling a specific date and time - I use the Google Calendar to schedule repeating tasks. At the start of the week, I check the calendar and note the task in my planner. I’ve heard it been said, “What doesn’t get scheduled, doesn’t get done.” It’s not enough to have something lingering in the “gotta do sometime” part of our brain. We need to jot it down. Besides, we relocate that load from our brains onto a calendar which lightens us.
Connect the task with something fun or a reward - Once I get to the point where I know what I need to do and how to do it well, I go on autopilot. I love to listen to audiobooks when I’m doing housework. Sure, this can’t work for something like reviewing spreadsheets at work, but for that I use a reward. For example, I’ll focus on the task for 25 minutes then allow myself five minutes of goofing off (a.k.a., Polmodoro Technique). The goofing off is my reward. In a way, this last “E” could be for Enjoyment, since we tend to repeat those things we enjoy doing. But enjoyment does not yield endurance, it’s the other way around.
Use cool tools - There’s a difference between using a tool that’s merely good enough, and using a cool tool. In our example of cleaning a bathroom, I use a mop with a spinning wringer. Sure, any ol’ mop will do, but using my “spinnng” mop is gratifying and works great! Find a tool that you love to use and incorporate it. It will keep you connected to your task.
It would overkill to apply this method to everything in your life. For things that are done seldomly or only once, it makes no sense to create an entire system. I recently reprogrammed a new garage door opener. Since it’s a one-time deal, there isn’t even a way to repeat and iterate. So I watched a YouTube video and was done with it. That said, there are tons of things we do over and over again. It behooves us to have an underlying method as we hop from task to task.
We have pulled open the veil of our imaginary coworker Rich. He’s not any more gifted, talented, nor powerful that you or anyone. He simply goes about his job in a mindful and methodical manner, improving and iterating over and over again. There will be people who don’t like the Rich’s of the world. Those folks don’t want to believe that there’s a better way of doing things and that any of us can improve upon our work and ourselves.
If we’re more like Rich, we’ll be Rich. Maybe not in a week, or a month, or even a few years, but eventually. That’s the nature of the method - it works over time. The world may seem to reward criminals and cheaters, but that’s far from the truth. They’ll get their short-lived reward and end up losing it all. Those who build with integrity may not get the reward in the short term, but will be rewarded in spades in due time.
Rich is making headway at work and in the world. He is, thanks to “The Four E’s,” a jolly-good fellow.