Most people don’t spend enough time focusing on the methodology of control. There is a science and an art to it. Yes, like everything else, moderation is the key.

In your business and your personal life, are you ready to devote some energy and time to seizing control of your day and your destiny? Then let’s get technical and talk about hard details. Center your efforts around three primary tools: digital voice recorder, Microsoft Outlook, and cellular phone. Of course, none of these tools are new and they stand on their own in their usefulness. However, it’s when one combines them that a new and powerful sense of control is found. These tools are about the following:

• Having a goal-oriented, consistent strategy of communication with others and with yourself.
• Having efficient systems to accomplish all necessary tasks, and completing them promptly. “Most recurring processes can be automated, delegated.”
• Not suffering the effects of errors of omission — ineffectiveness due to actions not taken. Most of our failures stem from what falls through the cracks, not from overt mistakes.

These tools are about event control. Think of the mind as an endless film strip spewing out a stream of thoughts rushing downhill with no rhyme or reason. Good and bad thoughts, pointless thoughts, historical anecdotes dredged up from the past, future events in vivid Technicolor arriving before their time, hazy wistfulness and beautiful, brilliant insights when least expected. Coming hard and fast, useful and useless thoughts pass through consciousness in relentless sequential order.

How to trap the good ideas and at the same time slow down the incessant mind-noise? Very simple: Carry a digital voice recorder. When an idea worth remembering appears, pull out the recorder, press the record button, and record the thought. Then put it away, forget the thought and move on, leaving your mind with one less bit of clutter
For me, it doesn’t matter whether I’m driving, walking, working, sitting in the theater, having lunch with a friend, waking in the middle of the night, reading a book, skiing, cycling, or climbing a mountain. I capture the thought, and my mind is free to move on. There is nothing more to ponder in the moment and nothing to remember later. The film strip charges ahead and, as the best parts appear, they are instantly and permanently captured.

Daily, I review the recordings of the past 24-hours, transcribing them into the appropriate Microsoft Outlook task, calendar, or contact list. Once transcribed, the thought has permanence and action will be taken.

Microsoft Outlook, my second efficiency tool, has enormous time-savings advantages over the classic paper-based day planner that I lugged around for so many years. Synchronizing Outlook with my PDA once every day, all information is at my fingertips no matter where I am. As a manager, the most vital feature is the task list. (Hint, if you have managers, designate each manager as a “category,” thus centralizing each manager’s various tasks, the better to engender concise and quick “sit-downs” to review progress on various tasks.”) Outlook’s appointment calendar and contact information features are also vital. Keep them up to date and USE them.

One mandatory habit that remains from my former paper-based Franklin-Covey planner routine is my early morning “planning and solitude session.” In the quiet of dawn, it’s time to download the voice recorder information into Outlook and then review the tasks for the day. This session is the day’s most significant act of personal control.

The third efficiency component is the cell phone. The key understanding? My telephone number doesn’t represent a place, it represents me! After all, people aren’t looking for the place where Sam is located; they’re looking for Sam. But, this fact of life can lead to a day of unending disruption.

And why do I mention the ubiquitous cell phone here? Here’s the subtlety: Everyone has a cell phone but for most, it is improperly used – it’s a source of anxiety and a time-waster. This means the cell phone’s best feature is its on-off switch. The primary purpose of my cell phone is to make calls, not to receive them and so the phone spends a large part of the day turned off as I divert incoming calls to voice mail. This way I can focus on immediate tasks without interruption. I’ll call people back later when I am in the call-back mode. I will add here that through the course of the day I get very few incoming calls. Maybe one or two. The details of my business life are handled by others, or by automated systems. (How I accomplished this is another story for another time.)

That’s it! Three integrated communication tools to grasp control of the day. If you can muster up the necessary self-discipline, and have the patience to work out the details of how the tools interface with each other to suit your own style, I promise you will experience significantly more control and peace in your day.

Afterthought, July 2009: Note that late last year I combined the three tools mentioned above into a single combination tool (i.e. the Blackberry). I immediately hated it and went back to my former three separate tools as described above. The added “benefit” of having email at my finger tips was a distraction because in just packing it around there was a subtle (and sinister) prodding to check messages in every spare moment. It didn’t contribute to my preferred day: a day of peace and concentration. Another annoyance with the all-in-one/internet device: my preference is simplicity and I found the operation of the tiny combination tool to be mentally cumbersome.

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To get what one wants one must have control and the first step in getting control is to know deep down that control is a good thing. No matter personal attributes and desire, without control one will not get what one wants. As I usually do, I go back to Ockham’s law and the truth that the simplest solution is invariably the best solution. Then, I reason, in this simplicity, the pathway to control is gaining the understanding, first, that the world we live in is mechanical and that those mechanics are linear. And second, those mechanics of the world – I call them systems – work perfectly 99.9% of the time whether we like it or not. They’re self-propelled; I like to say they have a “penchant for perfection.” This means that if a system is set up, either quietly by nature or overtly by a human, it has an almost innate desire to fulfill its purpose.

In understanding these fundamentals deep down, it becomes evident that to get what one wants there are steps that must be taken to optimize certain sub-systems, and those steps must be taken in the correct sequence. Very simple, yes? Yes.

I am just finishing a terrific book entitled The Gamble by Thomas Ricks, a Washington Post columnist. The book chronicles the failure of our presence in Iraq from 2003 through 2006, and then the success of the “surge,” the dramatic turnaround spearheaded by General David Petraeus that began in January 2007. It ends with some predictions for the future. Never mind the politics here. This is about mechanics.

In a nutshell, the original strategy in Iraq was to defeat the enemy by taking them on with a slash and burn methodology that entailed both massive and incisive strikes followed by pullbacks. Our troops would fight and then withdraw to fortified barracks outside the neighborhoods. Al Qaeda would immediately and violently reinsert themselves in the conquered and then abandoned neighborhoods. It was a vicious circle that was going nowhere as both sides suffered massive casualties.

The surge included adding more troops but more importantly, imposed a change of strategy. Our troops were to go from a “kill the enemy” mission to a “protect the citizenry” mode. To do this, the military went into the neighborhoods and established “local outposts” right inside the social network of the various neighborhoods. Our troops made personal, one-on-one connections with the locals. By establishing relationships and mending local social dysfunctions and misunderstandings, successes included recruiting former enemy militias and getting the trust of the populace. The military went inside, and one by one, fixed the local social networks (social systems) while offering security and a pathway to future peace. In addition, engineers were busy repairing mechanical infrastructure systems such as power, water and schools. Again, forget trying to figure this out from a good or bad stance. Keep it mechanical. This is about going inside, taking things apart, and then fixing the separate elements one-by-one. The context here, a nd the politics, don’t matter. What matters is the insight that the mechanics of the world are simple and they perform in predictable ways: Fix the subsystems of a dysfunctional entity and the overall system entity gets better; Mismanage an efficient system’s sub-systems and things go to Hell in a hurry. Very simple….

Here are some quotes from The Gamble. If you have read my book, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, and have internalized the systems methodology, these thoughts will resonate. Think of your own life as you consider these thoughts:

…even more significant than Petraeus’s military background is his determination. It is the cornerstone of his personality and a characteristic that seems to strike everyone he meets. One of his favorite words is “relentless.”

In the past (Patraeus) said, the Army had taught officers what to think. Now, he said, it needed to teach them how to think.

Rank is nothing; talent is everything.

Flexibility as applied to military leadership might be defined as being open to change as an opportunity and having a tolerance for ambiguity; adjusting rapidly to new or evolving situations; applying different methods to meet changing priorities.

The first and foremost task of a commander is to understand, with a steady head, the nature of the conflict in which he is engaged. In order to achieve that understanding a commander can be neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic; and especially not subject to…mood swings., seeing every minor victory as a triumph and every partial setback as a disaster.

It is axiomatic that good tactics can’t fix a bad strategy, but that a good strategy tends to fix bad tactics, because the inappropriateness of those individual actions becomes self-evident when seen against the larger scheme.

The surge was more about how to use troops than it was about the number of them. General Raymond Odierno’s great accomplishment may have been making sure that all his forces were dancing to the same tune and at the same time.(

The danger of making policy on the fly and not vetting it through scrutiny and debate is that it may win short-term advances without recognizing long-term costs.

So, the mechanics are simple and they apply everywhere all the time. Get this book by Thomas Ricks. It’s a solid analysis pointing out some very fundamental basics of management.

If you haven’t read my book but want to know more, there’s lots of summary information at workthesystem.com. Also, see Facebook: “Work the System.”
-sam c.

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The system improvement perspective is permanently etched into the minds of those who manage large, successful organizations, but the interesting thing is that it is such a simple concept, many of the people who innately embrace it can’t describe it, much less identify it as the critical factor of their success.

Via managers who understand the process, the large-business leader focuses on perfecting systems and keeping them that way, constantly making efficiency adjustments while simultaneously keeping up with trends and changes. It should be the same for you if you are to climb out of the morass within which 95 percent of the world struggles.

For your business, you must find and keep employees and suppliers, supervise the creation and sales of your product or service, make payroll, pay taxes, and steer the whole enterprise toward a profit. If you are to leap ahead, your product or service must be consistently superior, and that can’t happen if your people don’t hyper-focus on the details of how that product or service is produced and distributed.

In the short term, you must focus on creating extraordinary, well-defined systems. In the long term, you and your staff must relentlessly tweak and maintain those systems. The by-product will be an exceptional service or product that people want.

And remember: All the ships in your fleet must be at peak efficiency. One slow boat will hold back the entire flotilla. This is a central tenet of the Work the System method, and it’s the reason you will want to ensure that all your people are psychologically on-board with your systems methodology. You’ll want everyone in your organization working at peak capacity, repairing, tweaking, and adjusting to outside changes. The fleet must move forward full steam, directly toward the common goal, and it is your job to make sure that happens. This is called “being a leader.”

Sam Carpenter is the author of Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, published by Greenleaf Book Group, May 1, 2009.

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The cure to workplace chaos – boring but true – is to get things down on paper. First, put together the Strategic Objective. It will require a few hours to develop a draft, and a few more hours over another couple of days to get it right. Creating it is pretty much a one-time event, but allow for minor future revisions as the environment changes.

Next, after you write the Strategic Objective’s first draft, you will begin work on the General Operating Principles, the contents of which will be accumulated bit-by-bit and then perfected over a few weeks’ time. Still, the total time invested isn’t much. Once completed, this document will also remain relatively static over the years.

Third, for your business or your job, you will create a collection of Working Procedures. A Working Procedure is in itself the archetypical system. Products of system improvement, each is an exact guideline for executing the process it describes. (This third form of documentation will be addressed in detail in its own separate chapter.)

Over the long term, you and your staff will spend the majority of documentation time creating new Working Procedures and tweaking existing ones. Although the Strategic Objective and the General Operating Principles will get little mechanical adjustment later on, their fundamentals are key to the creation of your Working Procedures (or, in your personal life, in just navigating the day). In any case, at work, all three documents will remain front and center in your mind.

For every unit of effort and time you expend on the three documents, the return in personal time and financial freedom will be at least hundredfold. I am not exaggerating.

-excerpt from Sam Carpenter’s book Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less

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The vision led me to a doctor who specializes in sleep disorders. The doctor’s recommendations had a strong theme: reduction of stress. This led me to the subsystems of yoga, more sensible exercise, and meditation. I would substantially reduce my intake of caffeine, alcohol, and sugar. There were other systems to modify: changing the layout of my bedroom, removing the clock from the nightstand, refraining from reading in bed, and turning the lights off at the same time every night. I would adopt a more consistent system routine for preparing for sleep. Another thing: Testing indicated my requirements for sleep were less than average—six hours was enough—and so I should avoid lying awake in bed, expecting to get eight or nine hours. Lying there waiting for sleep to arrive was stressful in itself. Instead, I should get up and read, work, or even exercise.

With the help of my regular doctor, I found my blood chemicals were out of balance. Those chemical imbalances affected my sleep pattern, and it was a simple matter to fix those subsystem imbalances with supplements.

I had to reduce my hours at the office and that meant getting the company to run itself without me being there every minute. That transformation was already underway, using the same Work the System thinking.

I got back to a healthy sleeping routine over the course of just a few months, literally doubling each night’s sleep duration.

Now, if I find that my sleep is less than what it should be, I can trace the problem back to a violation of one of the dozen or so system guidelines I initially identified in my “sleep system–improvement” project.

I attacked the overall problem by isolating the primary sleep system and then breaking it down into subsystems that could be manipulated. By taking an outside-and-slightly-elevated vantage point, I was able to tweak my sleep process to more and more efficiency, one piece at a time. It was pure mechanics.

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Toilet paper is a mandatory accessory. It may be the one thing that all of us have used daily for all our lives. As an illustration of a system that is ubiquitous, it’s perfect. 

The act of loading toilet paper on a toilet paper roll is a system—a system that proceeds in a linear fashion until the goal is accomplished. Step one: In the bathroom, approach the sink. Step two: Open the cabinet door underneath the sink. Step three: Reach under the sink and grasp a roll of toilet paper. Step four: Take the protective wrap off the roll. Step five: Approach the toilet paper dispenser with the roll, etc. 

Ask yourself the following question. Right now, in your own house or apartment, is the paper roll loaded on the dispenser with the free end of the paper off the top of the roll where it can be easily grasped? Or, is the leading edge off the bottom, against the wall, where one must awkwardly reach underneath the roll to retrieve it? 

For the fun of it, over the years I’ve kept an informal tally. Not counting hotels and motels where professional housecleaners have been instructed on the most efficient positioning, it is a nearly 50-50 split with a slight advantage going to those who chose “top.” This means most people don’t think one way or the other about the insertion of the roll in the dispenser. (Or, implausibly, one half the population is adamant the roll be inserted one way and the other half of the population, the other way.) 

So, not many people think of this triviality. Is it important? Of course not—but that is not what matters here. The important point is the illustration of the lack of systems-thinking by the vast majority of people. 

Since having the retrieving end of the paper on the top of the roll makes grasping the paper easier, why don’t all people load the paper that way every time? Is the task of inserting the roll one way more difficult than inserting it the other way? Not at all. But deciding to always do it this way would require a one-time analysis of the goal and the process—in this case just a few seconds of time—and we Westerners don’t oft en consider underlying processes, even ones so innocuous as this one. Most of us are not naturally predisposed to see life with the systems-perspective. 

Yes, this is a silly illustration, but try to get past that. See that in considering loading the paper in a different way, you are putting yourself outside-and-above the act of loading toilet paper. You are deliberately managing the process in order to produce an incrementally better result every single time the process executes in the future. 

There is another, more visceral lesson here, and maybe it’s a bit unnerving. Because you have considered this toilet paper question, it may cause you to choose to load your rolls in a more deliberate way, or the contrarian in you may consciously decide not to. Whatever your choice, my prediction is that from now on you will think about the process every time you replace a toilet paper roll. Like it or not, due to this end-of-chapter illustration, there is a small slice of systems methodology that has been permanently imbedded in your thinking process. 

Welcome to my world. 

For the record, when I polled my management staff in a staff meeting on how they load their toilet paper at home, I got a 100 percent “Pleeeze! Off the top, of course!” response. Even in the most mundane tasks, the Centratel staff reflexively takes a posture of outside-and-slightly elevated.

Sam Carpenter is author of the book, Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Working Less and Making More. Visit www.workthesystem.com to purchase the book and/or receive a free download of Sam’s “Six Steps to Working Less and Making More.”

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During job orientation, we ask the new staff member to change that internal self-talk to “I’ll do it now because that is how things are done at Centratel.” 

Our experienced managers embrace the “Do it now” credo because it is so potently effective, not just because it’s our policy, but because it just works! No need for self-explanation; no time for inane back-and-forth internal dialogue. The rule is, “just do it NOW and let’s get on with things!” 

Yes, this “because I said so” dictate may grate a bit, especially with the independence and freedom we Westerners take for granted. We don’t like arbitrary rules imposed by others, but in a business an employee has the freedom to quit if the rules don’t seem reasonable. In the free world, anyone can leave a job to go to work for someone else, start a new business, or sit on the couch and do nothing. 

But, for the new Centratel employee, once a concept is tested and the workability of it proven, it’s a no-brainer. It’s just logic: Consistently superior end-results are justification for cast-in-concrete methodology.

 Author of the book, Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, Sam Carpenter is hosting a January 2009 two-day, life-changing Boot Camp that will change your life (and your business) forever. See www.workthesystem.com/bootcamp for details.

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But as a result of my mini-enlightenment regarding the systems of my business, I grasped that my body was likewise a collection of systems. I bore down on the revelation, and asked, “Of what are these systems composed?” It was obvious: my body’s composition is of chemicals. With this realization, I asked my doctor to give me a wide range of blood tests. Convinced of my “depression,” at first he balked at the idea, but then conceded. 

The blood analysis showed my adrenal glands had shut down and my master hormone, DHEA, was not in evidence. The “stress hormone,” Cortisol, was in the stratosphere, another important hormone was deficient, and to cap it off, I was chronically dehydrated. 

My task was to work on each of the systems individually, and one by one, bring each back to normalcy. Once I got all four dysfunctional systems back to efficiency, I would have a balanced, holistic body and an alert mind. How could it be otherwise? 

For the next two years, I took the blood tests repeatedly, as I watched my bodily intake, added relevant supplements to my diet, and modified my lifestyle, bringing my various chemical systems back into balance. My chemical makeup was a mess at the beginning but was completely in tune at the end of those two years. I was physically strong again, and my thinking was clear. 

Was it that simple? Yes and no. On the one hand, the road to recovery was obvious—what I had to do was clear. On the other hand, it was sometimes a struggle to be self-disciplined enough to do what needed to be done. I stumbled once in awhile, but I succeeded enough to improve things dramatically. Do I still stumble? Yes! 

How about you? Are you sure the chemicals that compose your body are OK? If they are not, could this be affecting your physical and mental performance? Consider taking your health into your own hands by directing your doctor to perform full-screen blood tests. Then again, your solution may not require a doctor. If your chemicals are OK, maybe you just need to get regular exercise, eat better, and find more sleep. 

A final thought about measuring your body. If you are addicted to a substance, however benign, an imbalance exists. Any foreign substance throws things off —so a good starting point is to quit those substances and face the world “cold turkey.” It won’t be easy, but you’ll be in select company. 

There is no better place than one’s body to start getting things straightened out. Using systems strategy to analyze the physical body—the vehicle that holds and transports consciousness—is perhaps the most “outside-and-slightly-elevated” position one can take.

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Linda was the interior designer. I was the general contractor. 

In this world of framers, plumbers, electricians, roofers, and concrete specialists, there is an interesting commonality among inexperienced subcontractors: It is difficult to communicate with them. Phones go unanswered, messages are left but no return call is forthcoming, or voice mailboxes are full. 

Generally, the contractor has “gone missing.” 

How do these people stay in business? 

The dysfunctional communication system is a reflection of the new contractor’s chaotic personal methodology in which he or she is so wrapped up in fire-killing and “doing the work,” that insidious inefficiency remains invisible while it gobbles up the bottom line. It’s a subconscious miscalculation in which unhappy customers are relegated to the list of “those things that can’t be measured, and therefore have no value.” The owner of this business must make a perspective adjustment or the business will fail. (And, per the statistics, the huge majority of them do fail).

Sam Carpenter is author of the book, Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Working Less and Making More.

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Linda and I sit down for a meal in a restaurant. At this point, before even saying a word, the waitperson, in this case a female, has earned a twenty five percent tip. It’s downhill from there. If she greets us with “how are you guys today?” there is an immediate five percent deduction in the tip for off -handedly calling my wife a “guy.” Now the tip can be no more than twenty percent. If the waitperson delivers the food and walks away with a semi-pretentious, air-headed “enjoy,” there is another five percent discount. If she delivers the check along with the food (working man’s diners accepted), there’s another five percent off the top. If she checks to see how we are doing at mid-meal and blatantly interrupts one of us mid-sentence, yes, there is another five percent deduction. Now we’re getting to no tip at all. 

Although I don’t sit there tallying things on paper, or even in my head, and seldom does a waitperson go without being tipped, the essence of my thinking process is in the above formula. Call me persnickety. It is systems-thinking both at its best and at its most ridiculous. 

How does this relate? If I were the owner of a restaurant, understanding serving food is a process that repeats itself, I would be watching my own reactions while dining at someone else’s restaurant. I’d take notes. In my own restaurant, I would produce a Working Procedure of “never use” phrases and actions and then would make sure every single one of my servers knew it by heart. It would be called the Forbidden Phrases and Actions Procedure. (Yes, really. That is exactly what I would call it.) This Working Procedure would be my obsession and my staff’s center of attention. We would continuously update it, using my own experience as well as feedback from customers, open-eyed staff, or whomever. Only one or two pages in length, it would be alive; the continuous centerpiece of discussion and action, a document that old-hands and new people would study, discuss, and tweak. With everyone’s input it would improve steadily over time.

For the owner of a restaurant, how much work is this? A simple document like this could quickly take a restaurant’s service quality from mediocre to superb—an incredible payback for a tiny investment of time and effort. 

To summarize: A propensity to analyze other’s service quality has two benefits.  

The first, it is a reminder the customer has a visceral inclination never to return if there is a bad experience. (Conversely, a customer will dogmatically return when there is a good experience). The customer has a potent memory. 

Second, one becomes inspired to devise ways to reduce their own customers’ bad experiences.

Sam Carpenter is author of the book, Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Working Less and Making More.

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