After a long paint party at the Nauti Crab, I was sitting there with a cold drink, letting my brain cool off, when my friend Jake from Caye Casa wandered over.
“Melody!” he said. “Perfect person to ask. You’re always juggling seventeen things at once. How do I get my team to work more efficiently? Everything at Caye Casa is taking way longer than it should.”
I laughed and said, “Dude, I’m having the same problem. I just started reading a whole book on efficiency. This is what I have learned so far:
I explained the three-step method:
1. Observe the problem.
2. Figure out what’s slowing things down.
3. Let your team suggest the solution — because once they think it’s their own idea, they’ll actually do it.
Jake nodded like he had finally found the missing chapter of his life.
“I’m going to try it on my wife Karla first,” he said. “She takes forever to get breakfast done, and I’ve been wanting to bring it up.”
Last week I saw him again same spot, same paint-splattered clothes.
“So,” I asked, “did your efficiency study with Karla work?”
“Oh, it worked,” Jake said proudly. “I watched her, pointed out what slowed her down, and then let her come up with the solution.”
“lol, And what did you learn?”
He sighed.
“I learned that instead of her taking twenty minutes to cook my breakfast… it now takes me fourteen minutes to cook it myself.”
The events and characters depicted in Wolfe’s Woofer by Melody S. Wolfe are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The column is intended for satire and entertainment purposes only.
