Work can be boring. It can be so boring that you find yourself watching the clock just to find out that your work day has been 15 minutes long so far. What if it becomes boring for a leader? As a leader you have huge impact on the mood of your employees, you also might have impact on your own day. As a leader you cannot accept to be bored. So what do you do? First of all have a clear goal with every day. My goal is to save seconds, minutes, and hours in every aspect of my job. I lead a call centre with 37 employees. 30 seconds of a task, can mean that we can handle 40 more calls. I continue to search for new areas of improvement. For instance 1GB extra RAM in the computers can save each employee about 9 minutes a day, this equals almost as much as hiring a person in 80 % position. The mathematics are easy, the investment pays it selves within a few months. I continue to search for new ways, new routines and new looks to old habits every day.

I am lucky I have developed as a leader over several years, I have not always had success, and when I failed I was bored and ignorant. I could sit around and wait for better days. This will not ever happen again. The fun about being a leader is to find better ways of doing the stuff you do each day.

Never accept routine work.
Do you have a lot of routine work? Do you fill out forms, file papers, and write reports or whatever? Does it take hours out of your day? Have you ever considered if any of these tasks can be done easier, faster, and smoother or even be more fun? If you use excel a lot, maybe you should get some web developer to look at it, and maybe a database would make everything easier. A lot of people in almost any kind of job can save a lot of time by talking to a web developer.

Web developer? Me?
I am a web master by education. In all of my jobs I have always created some kind of application to save time, or to gain control. When I worked as a salesman I created a form to keep track of deliveries that we would process during the evening. We could place a delivery order, keep track of capacity and print a list of items to get from the storage, and a drive list, where the customer needed to sign when they received the object. We would get reminders, we could tell our customers when we arrived and we could place items into the car in the right order, depending on when they went out again. Earlier it was a manual job written down on random available pieces of paper, customers was forgotten. Today I do the same with an ongoing competition at work, saves me a lot of work in excel sheets.

A challenge for you!
Find one thing today that you can improve. Find one thing that you can do more efficient or something that can make your day easier. Or maybe you can find one thing that can improve the day of others around you? Can a change of routine save a minute or two for each of your employees? How will that affect the total production? If you work at a call centre with 400 employees and all of them can find a method of saving handling time by one minute each day, you will probably serve 100 more customers a day.

If you decide to accept the challenge, please tell me what you did and how it went.