Lessons from the Slow Play

Lately, I’ve been partaking in a variety of different activities in my life that require a bit of a time commitment. These include home improvement, flyfishing, sourdough bread baking, fermenting sauerkraut, and dehydrating fruits and vegetables. I know — this seems like a random assortment of activities, but there are some common threads that I think are slowly teaching me to be a better person. Allow me to explain.

Home Improvement

Amid our many projects, we just remodeled a bathroom, and while we hired a plumber to install the new shower, I decided to do the drywall repair on my own. This ended up being a multi-day process. First I applied three coats of joint compound over the course of a few days to get the wall flat and smooth followed by spray texture to match the existing wall orange peel. And this is just one of the many projects we have to do on our fixer-upper built in the 60s — one little bit at a time.

Flyfishing

As we quickly approach summer, I’m getting ready for some serious time on the river. But in the lead up to those days out on the water, I need to spend the time tying a few dozen flies — prince nymphs, elk hair caddis, wooly buggers, and more. Without them, I will have nothing with which to fish. Sorry if I just lost you.

Making Sourdough Bread

I made my own sourdough starter about four years ago and have been baking a loaf or two per week ever since. Each loaf requires flour, water, salt, and anywhere from 12-24 hours for the natural yeast in the sourdough starter to eat the sugars in the flour, emitting gas to make the loaf rise.

Fermenting Sauerkraut

I love sauerkraut on eggs, with polish sausage, or just straight out of the jar. Sure I could go to the store and buy a jar. But did you know that if you have a couple of heads of cabbage, a little salt, and a week or two to wait, you can easily make your own, amazing sauerkraut full of probiotic goodness? 

Dehydrating Things

My wife gave me a food dehydrator for Christmas this year — something I’ve wanted for a few years. Since that time I’ve dehydrated apples, pears, blueberries, strawberries, tomatoes, pineapple, bananas, and more. I’m not sure if it’s the novelty or what but it’s quickly become a favorite snack for my kids. It so easy provided that you have a few minutes to prep and then 8-12 hours for the dehydrator to do its work.

The Slow Play

As I think through these various activities or hobbies, it’s interesting to note that I could pay for all of these things rather than making them myself. I can pay contractors to work on my house. I can go to a fly shop and purchase all of the flies I need. And I’m sure that my local grocery store has more sourdough bread, sauerkraut, and dried fruit than I’d know what to do with. All of these things can be mine in a fraction of the time, assuming I have the money.

Yes, especially in the case of home improvement, some of my motivation to do things myself is to save money. But there’s also satisfaction in finishing a project. 

I’m not sure I can adequately express just how cool it is to catch a fish on something I created. And, there are few things better than fresh sourdough right out of the oven with a little (or a lot) of butter on it. All of these things take time and planning, which makes the satisfaction all the better when they are complete. 

This article is about the lessons these hobbies are teaching me and I have four to share.

Lesson #1: Break projects into a bunch of small steps

First, I’m learning the importance of breaking up these projects into small attainable goals. As I look at my house, for example, I could easily get overwhelmed by everything that needs to be done on it. By making a list of all of the smaller tasks that need to get done, it’s not quite so overwhelming and the larger projects feel much more attainable. 

Lesson #2: Make meaningful progress regularly

Going back to the home improvement example, we’ve gotten into a pretty good groove of working on little projects each weekend. For example, our bathroom actually took a few weeks to finish. Some days I only spent 15 or 20 minutes applying a new coat of joint compound to the drywall where other days I spent an hour or two prepping the floor for tile. When I look back, I’m thrilled at all of the little steps that came together to make a new bathroom.

Lesson #3: Plan ahead to meet deadlines

One of the true joys of making my own sourdough and sauerkraut has been giving it away to friends and family to enjoy. Sometimes I have it on hand to give to people, but more often I’ve learned the importance of setting a deadline and working backwards to determine when I need to start the process. In the case of bread, it makes giving the gift that much better when I’ve put in the time and effort to prepare it ahead of time.

Lesson #4: Plan ahead to enjoy the spoils

I can’t tell you how much I love flyfishing. So much so that I’m already super excited for a trip that’s still a few months away. My trip will be so much more enjoyable if I start tying all of the flies I’m going to need now.

I also love a couple of pieces of sourdough toast with jam for dessert in the evening — possibly a little too much. But that toast doesn’t happen if I don’t invest the time 24 hours earlier to start the bread dough. When a craving strikes, I’m so grateful that I put in the time to have bread at the ready!

Conclusions

Thanks for listening to me talk about my boring hobbies. Now let me take just a few moments to apply these lessons to my work as a customer experience and customer support professional. I have never considered myself to be an expert strategic planner — but one doesn’t need to be an expert in this area to plan ahead and be prepared. Here are some quick examples where these lessons are helping me improve in my work:

• Customer Satisfaction – We conduct regular customer satisfaction surveys, and while I’d love for our scores to improve by 5% overnight because we fixed all the things, that’s not reasonable. What is reasonable is to daily and weekly review the results and find nuggets of insight from customer feedback, regularly improving how we do things.

• Knowledge Management – I’m super proud of the self-service options we provide to our customers (and I don’t get all of the credit) but I’ll tell you that writing hundreds of helpful articles and keeping them up to date is a HUGE undertaking. Instead, we think about the questions customers are asking and use those to add and update a handful of articles each week.

• Human Interactions – Early in my contact center career I helped customers but always had one eye on the call queue, secretly trying to conquer it in one, fell swoop. What a frustrating existence. When I changed my mentality to give my very best to each interaction, whether it was with a colleague or an external customer, I found that those were the building blocks of a customer-centric reputation. And when an entire company has that focus, we gain a reputation for being a CX leader.
• Team Crosstraining – We have some real experts on our team in a variety of different areas. But what happens when they call out sick or take a much-needed vacation? A little bit of ongoing effort to document what we do and provide short, microlearning-style lessons to our team ensures that we don’t skip a beat when team members miss work.

Yes, it’s been fun to observe my slow hobbies and realize that with just a careful bit of planning, I can accomplish some pretty cool things. Now it’s got me thinking of other things I want to accomplish and ways I can break them into smaller projects and begin making progress. More on those later!