I want to tell you a short story about something I do every single morning.I like to take hot showers as soon as I wake up, but doing so pumps a lot of moisture into the air. So I need to run the fan in my bathroom for a while to pull that wet air out of the house. Especially at -30.But the fan in my bathroom is connected to one of the lights in my bathroom, so if I turn off that light, I turn off the fan.A normal person would just flip the other switches in the bathroom to turn off all the lights except the one connected to the bathroom fan, but I am a gigantic nerd who wanders around telling Siri to turn lights on and off all day, so this is an issue of great complexity for me.But when I tell Siri to turn off the lights in that bathroom, the fan turns off as well.I acknowledge that this is a fully ridiculous problem, but I promise that in less than 60 seconds you will realize you have an equally ridiculous problem.So after years of either leaving all the lights on (instead of touching physical switches) or calling out individual commands for the lights I actually want to to turn off, I finally spent 5 minutes building a simple scene that turns off all the lights in the bedroom and the bathroom, except for the light connected to the fan.This should have been an obvious and accessible solution because I already have scenes for all sorts of things.I have a scene that turns on the lights in my office and starts playing classical music when I’m ready to get to work.I have a scene that locks all the doors at night and turns off the lights around the house for bedtime.I have a scene that turns off ALL the lights, including the exterior lights for optimal movie viewing, and another that turns them back on again.But I hadn’t taken a very few minutes to solve this simple problem by spending a few minutes to build a system that would serve me over and over again.There is something you or your team is dealing with right now that would be made exponentially simpler by investing a small amount of time to systematize.The short term pain of documenting the process or programming the software or rearranging the shared spreadsheet will pale in comparison to the time savings that is realized over and over and over again.And yes, the new scene I created to turn off the lights, but not the fan, is obviously called, “Only Fans.”TRY THIS: Whichever repetitive problem bubbled to the surface while you’ve been reading this is where you start. If you don’t already know what to do, gather your team and ask what could be done to automate or systematize the problem so that it isn’t a problem anymore. A small investment now will save you hours in the long run.My free PDF, “The 5 Secrets of Impossibly Effective Teams,” will show you the simple leadership moves that help teams unlock their full potential and deliver outsized results—without burning out. Grab your copy now at geoffwelch.com/secrets
