Duct Taped

I was an early tech adopter. Back when PDA’s were a thing, I used to run an entire factory floor from one. I would spend a lot of time trying to optimize my workflow and thought it was amazing that I could do everything from a mobile device. Back in those days you had to use software that you installed from a CD-ROM to sync your offline mobile device to the Outlook servers. My mobile Excel file was pretty ding-dang impressive. Until that one day. The sync software wouldn’t sync. At all. I tried and tried to get it to work. Re-installed the software (again- from a CD-ROM!). An entire day’s worth of production data on some stupid-ass device that was stuck in an infinite loop. And even though there was no production data, there was still production happening. Production was producing alright- it kept cranking along with no direction while my infuriating spinner kept spinning.I knew what I had to do. I was terrified. I had a lot of time and energy invested already. I had already scheduled the production floor. If I could. just. get. it.. off… the…. device. But the machines kept pounding. The production kept producing. The piles kept piling. The next shift was coming. I had to do it. I had to make the decision.I had to go-Analog.I had gotten so used to a stylus that I forgot what an ink pen was. I may as well have been drawing on cave walls with pieces of charcoal. But the Good Lord was smiling on me that day, because the pen that I happened to pick up was a Pilot G2. 1.0 millimeter tip. Black ink. Transparent barrel. And yes, I was writing on a cheap yellow legal pad, but the workflow in my brain was now a deep black gel perfectly dispensed from the tip of that pen and flowing onto the fibrous yellow of that legal paper.It was painstaking but I manually copied every job from that tiny little screen onto my legal pad. The factory was built for speed, and the operators were really good at driving at top speed, but if they were headed in the wrong direction, it would end in disaster. I had to point them in the right direction.So now I had a legal pad full of job numbers and quantities and time broken down into 0.6 hour increments (in a production environment we measure time in tenths of an hour). But I was missing tape. I needed tape. Where the hell is the tape? “Hey man, do you have some tape? Sure, duct tape works.” Any port will do in a storm. So now the whole night shift had their schedule posted on their production monitors on pages ripped from a legal pad with my chicken scratch handwriting, stuck there with duct tape. Duct tape. At least the G2 had a nice flow to it and the ink looked pretty damn good.And you know what? No one cared. Not one person so much as blinked an eye. Because they didn’t care how the schedule was posted, they just needed something to point them in the right direction and they were off to the races.How’s your software working for you these days? Where’s the infuriating spinning circle in your life? Chances are your smartphone has pissed you off at least once this week. Take an inventory of your digital workflow. Find that one thing that just keeps happening and just keeps driving you crazy. Is there a way to take it analog? Sometimes duct tape and a G2 is all you need.Peace to you,Max This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thinklikeadirector.substack.com