Let's Get Efficient

Hello! Today I was thinking about daily efficiency and how to be the most productive with how we work. This translates to all aspects of being a contractor from installing baseboard in the field to estimating in the office to where you put your silverware in your kitchen.

In the kitchen you want to put your silverware close to where you often plate your food or where you empty the dishwasher. This will help you get the daily job of feeding yourself and keeping the kitchen cleaned up quickly and efficiently. Keeping dishes in the most logical place relative to where you work cuts down on a few steps each time you reach for what you need. This may seem small, but over time and over years it can amount to miles and hours of unnecessary time wasted that could be spent on relaxing or being productive in other more valuable ways.

Here is a little example of how I learned to be more efficient in the field as a carpenter.

When I was an apprentice carpenter I was installing baseboards in a house for a client. I would measure each board, walk to the living room where I had the chop saw set up. I would make the cut, return to that room and install the piece, then measure, walk back to the saw, cut, walk back to the room and install the next piece.

Needless to say there was a lot of walking back and forth between the room where I was cutting the baseboard and the room where I was installing it. I was young and needed some direction.

A Journeyman on the job site took me aside and said, hey you can take all of your measurements for the pieces in that room all at one time, go to the chop saw, make all the cuts and then take a pile of pieces to the room and install them. This would cut down the walking by as many pieces as there were to install versus the one trip from the saw to install each of the cut pieces. This saved miles of walking and hours each day making me more efficient and more valuable as an employee to my employer.

The other simple example is do you take the wood to the saw or do you bring the saw to the wood. If you can bring the saw to the wood then you will save repetitive trips to the pile of lumber as you already have the saw and the lumber in the same place as where you are going to install it, again saving you trips, miles of walking and hours of unnecessary wasted time and money.

With estimating, you can cut down greatly on time spent doing this repetitive task by creating templates. This then helps you on the next project because you have already done an estimate like the one you are about to do so just pull up the past one and make a few adjustments to it instead of building it from scratch. Also, once you have proven pricing built into your estimate you can then roll that forward onto the next estimate and know that you are covered and it is accurate, saving you time calling vendors, subcontractors or pushing out Requests for Quotes.

With so much data being processed as a builder, being as efficient as possible with as many repeated tasks will help you be a very productive person.