During my time studying I have experienced problems with planning my studies in a specific course, and have thus not been able to reach the goals that I sat up for myself.

The cause is that I have never been able to get an overview of the work load that I have had and therefore never been able to estimate how much time I needed to study and how I should allocate my time for the various courses.

With lean thinking (jit and jidoka), I have been able to create a visual overview of my studies and with thus been able to estimate how much time I need to spend on each of the courses to be able to reach the goal that I have set up for each course.

If you want inspiration to try to create something similar for the planning of you studies, you can take a look at my planning table. It is in Swedish [apologies for my English speaking readers] but I think you will understand the concept.

Swedish winters are quiet dark and consequently in January this year I started having problems being on time at work in the mornings. When you run a company with employees, it’s not a good thing to do.

After trying conventional methods such as putting the alarm clock far away from bed and setting three different alarms without any success I realized that I had to do something drastically. I talked to my colleagues at work who also had the same problem and together we decided to set up the “Lunch-rule”.

The Lunch rule was quite simple and implied that if you were late one morning you had to pay for one of your collegues’ lunch if he/she was on time the same morning. The rule had a great effect – we’re all on time nearly every day after the introduction of the lunch rule.

However, even thought I generally do prefer rewards rather than punishments, my learning point in this specific matter is that punishments/rules are really effective!