The Reason I Started WayCharts Was to Help Myself.
I had been working at a super stressful - to me - job. A support role. Like as not, I would often find myself in a position where it was as if I had 5 things to do with 6 of them being urgent. Six, because there was at least one additional thing that would come up unexpectedly and be urgent.
This was a place where if the phone did not ring for fifteen minutes, people would be looking at each other wondering what was going on.
What I Started to Notice
If you pay attention, you notice that your energy levels vary throughout the day. If you are a morning person, then in the morning your energy is up. You are firing on all cylinders. Not so much in the afternoon.
It can take almost as much energy to keep track of the what, how and when of the work in your mind as it does to do the actual work. Energy goes down, errors become easier to make. Things take longer to do. For the morning person, it takes more effort to do things properly in the afternoon.
So what can you do? Some people drink coffee, but how sustainable is that.
Let's think about it. What does it mean to do things well? Let's break it down. It means thinking through what you want to do, the desired outcomes, how each step must be done to achieve those outcomes. Ensuring that all the needed steps for completion are carried out. All the specific criteria for finishing each step are met. A certain standard is maintained. This is much easier to do when your energy is high than when your energy is low.
Cognitive Load
Another closely related concept that is not always considered is cognitive load — the mental work load of doing the work.
Think of your cognition as having a number of different kinds of points, and you have a limited amount of each type. The more things you have to pay attention to simultaneously, the more points are used. When you are running low on free cognitive points, your efficiency and effectiveness is reduced.
That is when, if you are not careful, the quality of your work is liable to slip. That is when you are more likely to make silly mistakes and less likely to catch them.
I remember that same instructor telling me that for software development, realistically, you are at your maximum productivity for about 4 hours out of each work day. I have found this tends to be true for a number of mentally demanding jobs.
What I found is that just having a system — even if it is a checklist — that takes care of handling the additional things that go into not just doing the work, but doing it well, goes a long way to reducing the cognitive load.
"Write it down for your future dumb self."— A former professor. The sentence that became the seed of WayCharts.
What WayCharts Actually Does
Specifically, having a system that handles two things makes a significant difference:
- Keeping track of the order in which activities are carried out to complete a task.
- Remembering and fulfilling the specific criteria for completing each activity.
WayCharts is built around exactly that. Templates hold the process. Activities hold the criteria. Each job runs as an instance of a documented plan, so the question "did I do this right?" has an answer that does not depend on who is doing it or what time of day it is.
Templates for repeatable work
Build the process once. Capture every step, every standard, every decision point. Run it consistently regardless of who is in the room.
Explicit completion criteria
Not just done. Done to standard. Criteria at the activity level mean quality is checkable, not assumed.
Execution without overhead
Work through an instance step by step. The system carries the cognitive load. You do the work.
Handoff without anxiety
When your standard is in the system, a new person, a busier week, or a delegated job does not mean a quality gap.
The assessment was built on the same methodology - adapted from time and motion study principles used in healthcare, aviation, and manufacturing. It identifies exactly where your operation still depends on you being the one holding it together.
Start with the assessment.
18 questions. 4 minutes. A personalised breakdown of where your operation is solid, where it depends entirely on you, and where to focus first.
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