Yamazumi techniques are not just for the factory floor. In this article you will learn to apply them to your own life. Are you curious about where your life is going? Does it seem that the days just fly by, that hours slip past to become days and weeks and years? I get that feeling too. Where has all that time gone? What have I achieved?
Well I suppose it would be rather nice to know where my life went. Yet all those hokey old time management guides telling us to keep track of our daily activities just seemed to generate extra work, right? The journal become more important than the day it recorded; the system became more important than the product.
Well actually, the system is the product. The journey is the destination.
Six Sigma, the business philosophy that has given the world ultra-lean, 3.4 defects in a million manufacturing, teaches us that we value what we measure. It's that simple. Everyone loves the old truism that not everything that can be counted counts, while not everything that counts can be counted. True, but maybe we are all just using the wrong measurement system.
Go Yamazumi Go!
The Yamazumi board is a bright, colourful depiction of a manufacturing process. Go round any modern car factory and you'll find them pinned up to encourage the workforce. The process is shown as a vertical column, subdivided into areas each representing the steps in a linear process.
1. The steps that really add value are coloured green
2, Essential but not productive steps are coloured in yellow
3. Wasted/unnecessary steps are coloured red.
The Yamazumi is a great visual tool to literally show where delays, wastage and blocks are happening in any manufacturing process.
Your challenge
I challenge you to make your own Yamazumi for a week. You can do this in a spreadsheet. Break your week down into 7 columns of 24 hours. The aim isn't to create work - so just give a one word summary (e.g. Lunch) and assign a colour to the chunk of time - in this case Yellow. Fill in the Yamazumi grid, hour by hour.
This may sound strange, but it will be just as eye-opening for you as for the workers on the Toyota production line. You'll be astonished at how little fully engaged productive time delivers quite impressive results. The sheer time taken on non-value add activities (sleeping, eating, washing, transport) will be revealed. Then (if you're anything like me), so much after-work time will be a sea of red - the surfing, TV watching, meandering phone conversations, the hours becoming days, the days months, and the months years....
Even the green activities may not be perfect. Every activity, however good, carries an opportunity cost. What could you have achieved in the time available? Unless something is the best possible use of your time - something you can only define for yourself in reference to your ultimate life goals - well, it's sub-optimal.
Don't beat yourself up. The Yamazumi just reveals how much potential lies untapped.
The results may astound you.
(c) WestOcean 2010
If you'd like to read more on Yamazumi charts, the following links give some great examples:
http://www.acsco.com/Yamazumi.htm
http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2009/01/obiee-creating-yamazumi-graph.html
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