Automate Your Busywork

3Design and Implement

The design and implement phase of the flywheel is like planning your escape route. You'll get up close and personal with the tasks that waste your workday and determine how to get them off your plate—and out of your way. Automation can do the heavy lifting for you. It can tackle even the most frustrating processes while you strategize, write, lead, create, and do your very best work. It's time to visualize and build your workflows.

DESIGN: The Power of Maps

Let's return to the subway. To London this time, where the world's first underground passenger railway opened in January 1863. The railway grew over the next several decades, and in 1908 eight different systems merged to form what we know today as the London Underground or, more affectionately, “the Tube.”

Riders needed a map to help them navigate the system, but the diagram the engineers provided—which accurately depicted the aboveground rivers, trees, and roadways—was too confusing. The map remained until a young engineering draftsman named Henry Beck realized that riders simply want to reach the right station. The exact details of the street‐level geography are irrelevant when passengers are below ground. As Yale University's Michael Bierut explains in a brief TED video, “It's the system that's important, not the geography.”

After removing the aboveground elements, Beck standardized the map fonts and evenly spaced the stations. He also untangled the railway lines to travel in just three directions—horizontally, ...