What Are Your Best Practices?

‘Best Practices’ aren’t limited to big organisations when it comes to improving standards and processes.

We all exercise a variety of best practices on a personal level each day. Often we’re too busy managing a hectic schedule or navigating chaotic environments to take proper notice.

Even if you consider yourself the most disorganised person, I assure you you’ll have at minimum a good handful of best practices in play.

In fact, I argue we all have more built-in best practices than we realise, it’s a matter of revealing them. Once we do, we can apply these gems of efficiency to other areas of our personal and professional lives.

From this moment, pay closer attention to how you get through your day.

Examine your morning routine. Analyse the flow of your workday. Review what you do in the evening.

What methods do you already have down to a science that make your life easier?

For example:

• Mornings in your household may feel cyclonic, but perhaps you always manage to lay out your clothes to facilitate the morning mayhem.

• Your office may look like the Wreck of the Hesperus but you can always get your hands on any client file in seconds.

• You may be fighting fires all day, but your expenses get done like clockwork.

Whatever your victories, however small, first recognise and celebrate them. They’re more significant than you think because they demonstrate your capacity for organisation and efficiency.

Then dig deeper to understand why these systems work for you so you can recreate the effect in other areas.

In response to our examples above:

• Consider the case of laying out your clothes. Perhaps it’s because it removes an unnecessary layer of stress and decision-making during a chaotic time of day. You may not have even realised how the habit came about, but preparing your outfit in advance not only works, it works well.

It may seem small scale, but you’ve established a best practice for morning efficiency. The key now is to recognise similar time-crunched windows in your day.

What can you prep in advance of those times to lighten the burden?

• In the example of locating your client files amidst the muddle, chances are you’ve identified the files as important enough to have assigned a permanent place and structure that allows you to reach for them instinctively in seconds. Or, if you’ve experienced previous drama in locating bank statements or a passport you may have subsequently created a similar go-to zone to ensure panic doesn’t ensue again.

In this case you’ve created a best practice for stress-free retrieval of important items.

What else in your home or workplace tends to go missing that could be rectified by assigning it a consistent home?

• If you manage getting those expenses done while the rest of the day is up for grabs, then top marks! How do you do it? Maybe you’ve discovered that you’re more motivated to complete them every Friday from 11.15 – 11.45 before heading out to lunch. Or perhaps you’ve identified you can complete them in thirty minutes flat and you always have a thirty minute gap between meetings on a Thursday.

The best practice here could be the motivating factor of scheduling a dreaded task before something enjoyable, or marrying a task’s time with a logical matching time window.

What other tasks or chores could be exercised similarly to ensure they get done?

When we’re aware of our most efficient systems, routines and processes we’re in a better position to refine them further and ultimately apply these practices to other areas where we’ve been less efficient.

What are your personal best practices and how will you replicate them today?