I've been able to capitalize on opportunities in my career. In college, after working as a laborer on a construction crew, I got a part time job as a maintenance technician hired by a Property Manager (Hello Debbie!). She was willing to be flexible with my changing hours semester over semester and a Maintenance Supervisor (Hello Daryl!), who was willing to teach someone who was young but eager and willing to learn.

Daryl had a couple of basic philosophies: "we are hired to fix things not replace them" and "we do it all". That kept costs for the site down and lined right up with my upbringing where I was taught the value of doing things on your own, being thrifty and not wasteful.

He kept a clean and organized shop which made it easy to know what we had and not waste time finding things.

My last semester of college my company asked me to help out a site that had just let go of their supervisor and had a technician who had been there about six months. It was the classic scenario; behind on work orders and urgent move-ins pending and not ready.

Tossed the keys to the kingdom, I walked into the shop. Or more like stumbled into it. It was a mess. Empty or half filled boxes laying about, trash and a hodgepodge of things all over the place. My first goal was to get the move-ins for the weekend ready so I searched through for what I needed to do those and supplies in hand, the other tech and I went to it.

It was good to observe first hand the other technician during those first few days. I got a sense of his pacing, what he did well, what he struggled on and where his time went. After some long days the weekend came. Our move ins were ready and priority work orders were done. I asked the manager for overtime for myself and the tech to come in Saturday and maybe Sunday. I explained how I had no idea what was in the shop and how much time we wasted searching for things or having to part out other units. She hesitantly agreed.

That weekend we emptied out the shop, filled up two dumpsters with pure trash and put things in their place. I learned a valuable lesson there as I had taken for granted that all people could naturally just clean up and organize - but I found the other technician had no idea where to start or what to do. I could sense his angst in trying to organize along with me and soon tasked him to help with other things that needed doing. What I had attributed at first to just being lazy on his part turned out to be a lack of understanding of what to do and how to do it. He had never seen an example.

The time spent doing that paid off in spades downstream. We knew exactly what we had and what we didn't and cut out lost time scrounging around. It took a big push to break the negative inertia of what they had been doing. I also had to fight it in other ways. We had to create new habits of receiving supplies; unboxing the parts and throwing away the trash right away. We would spend 10 minutes at the end of the day cleaning up and making an order list. It took a little time and effort but soon the inertia was with us going in the direction we needed it.

This pattern has repeated itself over the course of my career. When I promoted to a regional level I found the same thing. Instead of an unorganized shop, it was unorganized files, documents and tasks. Instead of no process to turn a unit, it was no process to manage information. The necessary fix was essentially the same; put it the extra effort, make the time to set up, organize and break the inertia.

Ultimately it's the roots of what has become elucidin, a system designed to make you more effective with your time and efforts, a recognition that not everyone will have the time to create or the experience and know how coupled with the why to put things together and break counter productive momentum.  Our way to pay forward the lessons we were taught.