Smoothing the rough edges from life

f you are like me, if you are like most people; you are plagued by a slew of irritations, annoyances and frustrations throughout your day.

You ignore the frustration as you find workarounds and coping mechanism to overcome the road blocks placed in your way, in order to achieve your immediate goals.

Instead of ignoring these irritations I urge you to treat them as important signals that show where you can improve your life: that you isolate each of these annoyances and, remove them permanently from your life by applying a complete solution to the root cause of the problem, instead of engineering temporary workarounds to alleviate the symptoms. In this way your life is gradually improving as some of those repetitive issues stop reoccurring.

One technique that I have found personally useful is asking why five times. It has been made famous by Toyota which introduced it in the 1970's. Toyota credits the 5 why's technique with accelerating their process improvements.

The 5 whys in Practise

The Case of the Tired Developer

As an example of how this can be used, many years ago I found that I was constantly tired, pushed to the point of exhaustion. I asked myself,

• 1st Why "Why was I tired?" 
• 1st answer "I was stressed"
• 2nd Why "Why was I stressed?" 
• 2nd answer "I was not sleeping well"
• 3rd Why "Why was I not sleeping well?" 
• 3rd answer "I was stressed, also I was exercising less than I used to"
• 4th Why "Why was I was exercising less than I used to?" 
• 4th answer "I had fallen out of the habit"
• 5th Why "Why had I fallen out of the habit of exercising" 
• 5th answer "I did not have I regular time scheduled time for exercise"

If you ask the 5 whys at a different times you often come up with different answers. Some people think this is a weakness, personally I think it is a strength.

Let's ask the 5 whys a couple more times.

• 1st Why "Why was I tired?" 
• 1st answer "I was stressed"
• 2nd Why "Why was I stressed?" 
• 2nd answer ""I had too much to do"
• 3rd Why "Why did I have too much to do?" 
• 3rd answer "I was not prioritizing my task enough"
• 4th Why "Why was I not prioritizing my task enough?"
• 4th answer "Too many the tasks were rated as important"
• 5th Why "Why were too many the tasks were rated as important "
• 5th answer ""I had trouble letting go and accepting that some tasks would have to be done latter"

And again.

• 1st Why "Why was I tired?" 
• 1st answer "I was stressed"
• 2nd Why "Why was I stressed?" 
• 2nd answer ""I had too much to do"
• 3rd Why "Why did I have too much to do?" 
• 3rd answer "I said yes too often when I should have said no"
• 4th Why "Why was I not saying no?
• 4th answer "I did not want to disappoint people"
• 5th Why "Why did I not want to disappoint other people"
• 5th answer "I needed to tell myself that it was better to disappoint them now rather that rise their expectations then disappoint them latter.

I turned these why's and their answers into solutions. I started seeing improvement after I :-

• started exercising at the same time every morning
• made sure that only limited number of tasks were highest priority and
• I only accept new tasks when I had either completed old tasks or downgraded old tasks in priority.

Of course turning these kind of changes into sustained habits is not always easy, but I have some tips that might help.

You do not have to be Toyota to benefit from root cause analysis. Anyone can do it. When faced with a repeated annoyance, just ask why five times. 

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