Attention and creativity

Can you be creative in something without putting your attention on it? I know I can’t.

We only have so many units of attention. If something outside is always claiming them then how can we have the space to be creative?

Left to my own devices I eat the same food and follow the same routine every day. My wife thinks I am boring or strange, or probably both. Why do I do it? Answer: To free my mind for creative thought!

A good business is a mixture of art and science. Creative thought is something a business owner needs time and space to do. If you have to keep on reinventing the wheel and keep being interrupted by team members who don’t know what to do, how can you work on growing the business?

A documented business system can free up your time for creative thought. Your team members will be happy, too, because they want to do their job, not be lining up for your help all the time!

For a free consultation about creating or improving your documented business system, complete and submit this form.

How do people locate information?

Somebody has given you a very big cookbook for Christmas. Your partner has requested gnocchi and pesto. How do you find the recipes?

If you are a navigator you’ll go to the table of contents, find the section on pasta, then gnocchi, and go to the recipe. Repeat for dips and pesto.

If you are a task focuser you’ll go to the index, find gnocchi and pesto alphabetically and go those pages. On a computer you’d use search.

If you are a story teller you might start at the italian dinner parties page and follow the references or links to the right recipes.

In every business you’ll find the navigator, the task focuser and the story teller. Your procedure manual needs to cater for all three. Good procedure manual software can look after these three people almost automatically. This diagram shows where our three different team members will look:

For more information about our intranet-based procedure manual system that automatically provides table of contents and search, please contact us.

Tips for tables

This is my personal opinion of the best way to do tables. It goes against some traditions, mainly people’s desire to centre everything. Here is what I think:

• Align text left and numbers right. This is how we read them.
• If there are decimals, have the same number of decimal places for all numbers in the column.
• Align column headings the same as the contents.
• Put units of measure in the column heading.
• Use centring only for images, for example, pictures or words that people might read from a distance and recognise by shape.