I came home this afternoon to find that Nikki had put the keep cups (shout out to Yellow Bernard) in the mug drawer.
Up till now we had kept the keep cups in the tupperware drawer. That was annoying for a few reasons:
- the tupperware drawer is more cluttered and chaotic (the tupperWhere? drawer) so it was hard to get at the cups and find the matching lid (I am a bit OCD about matching cups and lids)
- the tupperware drawer is the bottom drawer so just that little bit more annoying to reach down and get things from
- because it's cluttered you may accidentially pull something else out of the drawer, while retrieving the cup, so you need to scramble to grab it, but because it's plastic it bounces halfway across the kitchen, or you pull something up at a weird angle so the drawer won't close fully…
So Nikki promoted the keep cups to the mug drawer. Second drawer down, waist height. Grab without bending. Easy done.
An obvious thing, that like every other workflow stroke of genius, is not-so-obvious. My wife is a workflow wonder woman.
She realised that the function and role that keep cups play in our daily lives and she placed them accordingly. Just because keep cups are plastic doesn't mean they belong with other plastic things.
No I wonder: what other things in your workflow or ministry patterns need to be promoted out of the tupperware drawer? Does the metaphor work for other things?
