The Best Laid Plans
A Bench Jeweler’s Guide to Planning Their Daily Work
Can you imagine going on a vacation without doing any planning. You just get in your car and start driving. Each time you come to a junction in the road you randomly choose to, turn left or right, or to go straight, and you spend your entire vacation haphazardly choosing which road to travel on.
You may be an avid skier and you just happen to come upon one of the most beautiful Ski resorts. However, because you did not do any planning you are there in the middle of the summer and there is no snow. Or you may love to go to the beach and you spend hours driving down a road that just happen to be parallel to a magnificent beach. You miss going to the beach even though it is only 5 or 10 miles away, because you don’t know it is there. You may enjoy amusement parks and spend your entire vacation driving around the country and never find an amusement park, simply because you did not do any planning for your vacation.
I’m sure you’re thinking “That’s crazy; no one would take a vacation with out at least planning on where they are going.” However that is exactly how many jewelers work. They take a job envelope out of their work box and work on it. Then they pull out another job and work on it. All day long they work on jobs haphazardly through the day working on the next job they just happen to pull out of the box without giving any thought to their work or making any plan. Most Americans spend more time planning two weeks of vacation than they do planning the other 50 weeks of their year.
Let’s take the vacation analogy a little further. Suppose you did plan your vacation. Your plan was to head east to spend a couple of days at a beach, then travel north to spend a day at an amusement park, and then drive west to spend a few days at a mountain cabin before heading home.
You leave home driving east toward the beach, but before you arrive at the beach you decide you have been going east long enough and you want to start going toward the amusement park and head north. After just a few hours of heading north you decide you’re tired of going north and really want to head toward the mountains and so you turn west. A while later you realize that you really need to be heading toward the beach as that is your first destination, so you turn the car around and head back east. Before you know it your week vacation is up and you have not reached any of your destinations. You have spent the entire week driving in circles.
Now I know some of you are thinking that is the stupidest thing I’ve heard of. No one would ever spend their vacation driving in circles, and I agree. However, that is exactly how many bench jewelers spend their day. They work on this project for a little while then they start doing a few repairs. A while later they are tired of doing that so they start something else, then they go back to what they started in the morning, but before finishing they start a few more repairs. On and on they go working in circles all day long and at the end of the day they cannot understand how they could work all day long and not get anything finished.
Often bench jewelers feel that planning their day’s work is too restrictive and confining, and they like to be more spontaneous. I agree to a point. Planning can be very restrictive. I’m sure we all know people who plan their vacations that way. They schedule down to the minute where they will be at each moment and what they will do, and look out for the person who would dare change those plans.
However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. The opposite extreme of not planning at all is just as detrimental to our productivity, if not more so. Planning should be seen as a tool to help us reach our destination rather than a strict set of rules that cannot be broken.