Routine or intuitive?

Every job in your office is one of two kinds of work.

And the most useful thing you can learn about your office is which is which.

The first kind is routine work.

It follows rules.

The same steps, in the same order, every time.

Moving information from one place to another.

Sorting it, totalling it, checking it against a list.

Building the same report on the same template every week.

Sending the same reminder every Friday.

The second kind is intuitive work.

It needs someone who knows your business, and can read a situation.

Deciding what to bid.

Calming down a client who's upset.

Working out why a job is losing money when nothing obvious is wrong.

Writing the message that wins the work.

Here's a simple test to tell them apart.

Could you teach it to someone who's good with a computer, but has never worked a day in your trade?

If you could, it's routine.

If they'd need years in the business to get it right, it's intuitive.

Now, here's why it matters.

Routine work can be handed to a computer.

Not the person.

The steps.

And a computer doesn't get tired at four o'clock, doesn't skip a step on a busy Friday, and doesn't make the same typo twice.

Intuitive work can't be handed off.

That's the work you hired good people for.

And here's what changed in the last few years.

The line between the two has moved.

Reading a handwritten packing slip used to need a person.

So did pulling the important lines out of a long email, or sorting a stack of messy invoices.

Today, a computer can do a lot of that reading.

So work you filed under "only a person can do this" a few years ago is worth a second look.

The test still holds.

If you could teach it to someone outside your trade, it's routine, even when the paperwork is messy.

Now, in most offices, the two kinds of work are tangled together.

Take an estimate.

Pulling the quantities off the plans and pricing them from the list is routine.

Deciding the margin, and what this client will actually pay, is intuitive.

Same task, two kinds of work.

So don't sort tasks.

Sort the steps inside them.

Here's how to do it this week.

Take every task your office does.

Break each one into its steps.

Put every step in one of two columns.

Routine, or intuitive.

Then look at the routine column.

That's your list of work that could be done for you.

And every hour taken off that list is an hour your people get back for the other column.

The goal isn't fewer people.

It's people spending their day on the work only they can do.

That's what you hired them for.