I was working as usual one day when a client asked me if I could speak arabic, I answered yes and we started talking about our work and passion, he is a pilot and since I brought the fact that I speak Japanese fluently he started talking to me about how Japanese have so many interesting behaviors and one of them was that they will point with their hand and say “Door is closed” each time they were closing the door of an airplane. I was surprised for a while since I only knew about this process being used on trains not for airplanes, but I quickly explained to him that this process is being used in trains and it reduces mistakes made by staff at train stations, or train conductors. I remember that the trains for new york also applied the same techniques and found that it really reduced the amount of mistakes made by the staff.
After like two day, a striking idea lightned me, since I have recently forgot to lock the door two times due to a change in the triggers of the habit. The two times were in days-off, which means I changed the clothes I wear and thus put the keys somewhere else. So the since I was asking myself, how can I make sure to not forget the keys another time, and how to improve also my tasks at work especially when you’re not using a checklist, I find out that I could use the same technique to reduce such errors.
I’ve been also forgetting to switch off some machines at work, often one machine or one something. But now, I combined the Japanese technique of pointing and verbalising along with knowing the number of machines to be switched off, since there is 11 device, I make a stop now and point at each machine while verbalising that it’s off for making sure everything is fine.
For locking the door, now first of all I make a full stop in front of the door, as if I will make a salutation, I verbalise that I’m closing the door and sometimes I add a simple twist which is I close the door, open it and close it again. This allows me to have more than one motion to do, since it’s easier to forget one motion than three. But I don’t do this all time. It was although important in the begining.
Talking about this reminded me of how often I was forgetting to take the towel with me into the bathroom, but the strategy I made for that is to simply count how many items I had to take with me to the bathroom and since then once that number was internlised I’ve never forgotten the towel.
In conclusion, it’s very cool to have some strategies around things you’re not doing well, sometimes some people are better at doing some things, sometimes not. But the nice thing is that you can always think of a strategy to make it better.