Woolgathering #143: Customer Service Is Everyone's Job
Plus: Grunge songs written by bots, really old buildings, and the rise and fall of getting things done.
My first job was as a bagger at a grocery store about a mile from my house. Every day, after clocking in, I had to check in at the front desk to receive my day’s assignment. Once I got there, a manager on duty would look at the schedule, see what needed to be done, and assign me my work for the shift.
But that big front desk was also the customer service desk. It was where customers would bring returns, haggle about wrong prices, and generally look for help. Because of this, at any given time when an employee came up to check in, there’d be a customer there, wanting help right away.
There were so many times I punched in and went to the desk, only to be whisked away on a mission to help a customer. I’d go on journeys with them to find an obscure product. I’d find someone from the bakery to help with their cake order. I’d reunite them with their lost grocery-shopping companions. On many occasions, I’d help one customer, only to be intercepted by another on my way back to the front of the store. There were times when it was nearly a half-hour before I could even check in with my manager after clocking in.
The funny thing was, there was a vestibule in the front of the store where the managers tended to be. It was outside of the view of the customers, right next to the machine where we clocked in, and would allow for us to check in without interruption. It seemed like that should be where we started our shift, rather than the customer service desk. That way, we could avoid being sidetracked before checking in and getting our orders for the day.
It seemed awfully inconvenient and inefficient to me. I would soon learn that I was right, but I was also missing the point.
Q2 has begun! Feeling productive?
If not, go check out Skillshare, where you can get access to my Getting Things Done in Google Sheets course, and see how to run a GTD implementation in a single Google Sheets document.
Feed Your Mind
An Artificial Intelligence Program Wrote a "New" NIRVANA Song
A.I. is everywhere and doing everything these days. Apparently, that includes writing songs that might pass as having been written by bands long gone. Case in point, the song "Drowned In The Sun,” written by an A.I. program that was fed 30 Nirvana songs as its input. It's a similar experiment to one done with Jimi Hendrix songs a few years ago. What a world we live in!
A Fascinating List of the Oldest Building in Every U.S. State
Growing up, I was a fan of the show "This Old House". But this list takes that concept to a whole new level. It's a list of the oldest building in each state in the U.S., including America's oldest bar! I wouldn’t call it cerebral, per se, but it’s definitely an interesting read.
“The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done”
Cal Newport is a great writer, and a great thinker in general. His new book A World Without Email is all the rage, and his fist book Deep Work is a classic. Here, he dives into the rise of productivity culture, and raises some interesting concerns about it. Case in point:
In this context, the shortcomings of personal-productivity systems like G.T.D. become clear. They don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They only help individuals cope with its effects….Productivity, we must recognize, can never be entirely personal. It must be connected to a system that we can study, analyze, and improve.
I applaud Newport’s skepticism, but I’m not sure about where he lands. At the article’s end he begs for a top-down, systemic approach to fixing our current productivity issues. I’m just not so sure about that solution, but I guess time will tell.
A Question
Why am I doing what I’m doing right now? What purpose am I serving by doing this?
It may seem like a weird question to ask yourself, but think of all the things we do to derail our goals. Many of them we do without thinking. We stress-eat. We verbally unload on people. We go down social media rabbit-holes. And mostly without pushing ourselves to ask why we’re doing it.
This why comes in two flavors—both of which are helpful to think about:
Historical Why: what chain of events brought me to be doing this?
Teleological Why: what goal am I pursuing by doing this?
It’s not that asking these questions once will stop the bad habit. But getting into the habit of checking your path to and your intentions for what you do is a simple way to interrupt harmful patterns—and begin to learn from them.
A Quote
“When you have something, use it with appreciation before it's taken away from you. And always remember those who don't have it.”
― Mary Uwamahoro