Let’s start with the corporate stuff and we’ll get around to the washing up ;-).

JIT Presentation Finalisation

Working as a business consultant in the corporate world I’ve worked in trusted advisor roles for many fairly senior people (senior as in senior positions, not really old people, lol). Invariably this always involves preparing presentations (‘decks’) for fairly major events (Town Halls, Offsites etc).

So where does JIT fit in?

One particular example springs to mind. I was preparing such a presentation for the CIO of a large organisation, he told me everything he needed, we spent a lot of time going through how it should all look in great detail and he gave me 2 weeks to pull it all together. Bear in mind that for such presentations an awful lot of work goes behind every single page which are usually summaries of lots and lots of data from across the organisation.

I knew what I was doing pulling this stuff together and was on top of my work (this and about a million other things for this very demanding client). I had a pretty good looking presentation at the end of the 1st week albeit with some incomplete bits and some data I was waiting on. You may think that it would be a good time to check in with my client, show him this 1st draft and check I was on the right lines.

This depends to an extent on the client and is usually good practice. That being said, often very senior clients change things on whims – i.e. things that don’t necessarily really *need* to be changed, but that they suddenly decide they’d like a different way. They could even do that then change their minds again. Often, perhaps because they are very senior, they will do this without a thought of all of the running around and effort needed to service their small change of heart on a seemingly small detail.

People work long nights and weekends to pull together the information needed for some of these presentations – lots of people. The end result has to be just so.

In this particular case, I knew that if I took the presentation to the client very early, there was a high chance some of it would be played around with, adjusted and changed on a whim just because he could and with no thought about all of the effort needed to ‘re-cut the deck’. So instead, I showed the client the presentation just a day before the deadline, i.e. Just in Time, knowing it was actually spot-on and taking the calculated risk of deliberately giving him little time to ask me for any major changes (risk because that decision would have backfired in a major way if he wasn’t happy with the presentation).

He was very happy with the presentation.

In fact, I can’t remember if he asked for any changes at all, he might have asked for some tiny changes which were additions and formatting but nothing that needed any more work from anyone except me.

Bear in mind that this is something I’d done many times before and was well within my capability – this is an important point when considering using the JIT principle that we’re going to come back to.

In this case I was sure that if I’d taken the presentation pack to him earlier he would have asked for more changes (just because he could) resulting in a lot more work for me and lots of other people contributing to this report and impacting my other work (and that of all of the other contributors).

In fact this was a strategy I used many times but only when I knew the material and the client well enough and was confident I could do so.

JIT Email Management

I’ve always liked to keep the number of emails in my inbox to 10 or less. Anyone looking over my shoulder would think I’m not busy enough. I am. I’m just as busy as the next person – often more so. My speciality in my consulting career has been jobs which involve the herding cats skill – business management, COO and trusted advisor type roles (which typically have lots of responsibilities across a wide range of areas). So how do I manage to keep my inbox to less than 10 emails? Because there is a huge difference between busy and organised.

I’ve written in detail about how to handle email overload in a guest article on Steve Scott’s site here: Managing Email Overload: How to Stop Being a Slave to Your Email Inbox.

Though there are a lot more details in the above article which will tell you how to build a system to cope with floods of emails that seem impossible to cope with, the key point for this article is that if things can be dealt with right away, then deal with them right away – i.e. Just in Time.

If I am on top of my work and I can answer someone in less than 5 minutes, I don’t think to myself I am so busy that I can’t even afford 5 minutes – I answer the email, because what takes 5 minutes now will take a lot longer than 5 minutes later when you come back to it for many reasons (you will have the cumulative effect (effectively ‘noise’ of doing this with many emails), the email in question will be less current, you will by definition be less responsive dealing with it later etc). However when you deal with things quickly, the recipient will really appreciate it, you will stay on top of things and you will be more efficient.

By the way dealing with things quickly does include having a brief look at something, deciding it needs more effort and having a rough idea of what’s needed and filing it in the appropriate place to be dealt with when you have more time to do it justice (e.g. your filing system could be by priority such as ‘Urgent, High, Medium, Low or by subject area, or both).

These days I don’t do much work in corporate environments but I still get a lot of emails and I still try and keep my inbox down to 10 emails or less.

JIT vs MRP

So in case you didn’t know, when people talk about using a ‘Just in Time’ (JIT) approach, they are generally referring to a methodology that originated in the car manufacturing industry to replace the older ‘Material Requirements Planning (MRP)’ approach where materials needed for manufacturing were planned in advance, ordered in bulk and stored in warehouses. With the JIT approach, materials are ordered just as they are needed as an integral and automated part of the production line process massively reducing warehousing and storage costs as well as other benefits (such as waste from miscalculated order sizes as parts are ordered as they are needed).

You could describe MRP as a ‘push’ methodology and JIT as a ‘pull’ methodology.

JIT is used my most car manufacturers these days and with improved technology and automation, is a very slick and impressive operation. The principle of demand-based-production (i.e. a ‘pull’ strategy) or demand-based-action even doesn’t necessarily need technology and automation, the original triggering ‘Kanban’ concept used in the car manufacturing industry was done using simple cards.

To learn more about JIT and its origins check out this definition on Investopedia which includes a handy video (though the guy’s voice is a little annoying): Investopedia JIT definition.

JIT Everything?

OK, so ‘JIT everything‘ is an exaggeration.

There are limits which I will come to later, but JIT can be used in everyday life, not just in work situations and specifically to make your life more efficient and buy you more time. See if you can work out what each of these things has in common, also with the two things above and I’ll tell you below what that is and why that is important to know when applying JIT principles.

First of all, here are just a few examples of where I use JIT principles in my everyday life, starting with something I just did right now in the middle of writing this article.

JIT Washing Up

Halfway through writing this article I made lunch (Dahl if you must know) and paused to enjoy that lunch with my wife. Immediately after whilst making a cup of tea and before coming back to continue writing this article I washed 1 pot, 2 bowls, a chopping board a knife and 2 spoons that we’d used to make and eat the food. It took very little time at all and for me is a better way to do washing up than letting the dishes pile up and doing them all at once – i.e. wash them up Just In Time. This may seem trivial but I really don’t like spending half an hour or more washing dishes, 5 mins is OK.

JIT Shopping

Recently my wife complained that I don’t do enough (grocery) shopping and that she was tired of spending hours in the supermarket. She was right. First of all I didn’t do as much shopping as her and secondly she did tend to spend a crazy amount of time (in my view) whenever she did go to the supermarket actually doing the shopping – at least 2 hours for a monthly shop.

So I agreed to do more shopping but my way. My way is to order shopping online for most of the stuff we need every week. After each shop arrives and I have put all the items away in the cupboards, fridge & freezer, I will see very clearly what we need next and jump on my computer and order the next weeks shop right away. Also, because it’s only a weekly shop rather than a monthly shop it takes less than 5 minutes to put everything away.

JIT Shopping & Exception Management

Worth noting that my JIT shopping method & weekly online shop does not completely replace the previous shopping which was mainly done by my wife. I did say ‘most’ of our shopping. This is because she (and I) still likes to do a bit of shopping, particularly locally and for fresh produce. What this ‘system’ has done is taken the burden out of shopping so that either of us only need to ‘top-up’ what we get in the weekly online shop and generally don’t need to spend more than 5 mins in a shop getting one or two items as and when we need. There is that 5 mins again.

This is effectively a kind of Exception Management which also catches anything we may have forgotten in the weekly shop.

JIT Laundry

So we are still undecided whose system to use for the laundry, but you can probably guess what kind of approach I prefer. If my wife is away and I’m in charge of everything, I tell the kids not to bother with the laundry baskets and instead throw things straight into the washing machine. As soon as the washing machine is full, the laundry gets done. This means we basically do one wash every day but I stay on top of it, we always have lots of clean clothes and more gets washed than otherwise would (as to make up a full load I often throw in cushion covers, tea towels, oven gloves, throws, anything in the house that’s made of material basically).

Another system where the workload is more frequent but smaller and we stay on top of it (though admittedly the British weather can have an impact – this works much better when it’s sunny and I can hang out clothes on the line).

When JIT Doesn’t Work So Well

So I asked you earlier what all of these things have in common.

The answer is that they are all fairly well know and repeatable processes.

JIT originated on the production lines of the car manufacturing industry – a very repeatable process. If they had tried to use a JIT approach the first tme they ever built a car it wouldn’t have worked so well. They’d basically be guessing what parts they needed and end up with either with a very strange looking car or a very time-consuming process. However once this process becomes repeatable, JIT is ideal.

Email is also a very repeatable process. We all know after some time of using emails how to open an email, how to read an email, how to file an email etc. We do the same thing every time. Whilst the content of these mails may be different, the process of receiving them and reading them is the same every time.

I have lots of day to day processes in which I know I use JIT principles and probably some where I don’t even realise that I use this approach but they will all be repeatabe processes where what needs to be done is very well known and well within my capability.

JIT is not suited to anything that is new and complex.

Final Thought – JIT, Decluttering, Simplicity and Mindfulness

Finally, I think that the principle of JIT in general works very well with three other things we tend to write a lot about here, namely Decluttering, Simplicity and Mindfulness.

By doing things just in time, not too early or too late, surely we are living more in the moment (Mindfulness) and as a result being more efficient. At the same time we are surely not overcomplicating things (Simplicity) as in the above example of the presentation where more work is avoided – and by buying just what we need when we need it (and also by doing just what we need when we need to) we are decluttering the space we live in and our mind.

What do you think?