We all want to spend more time focused on the things we want to focus on. We want to farm, not (pick one or more) clean the packing shed, do the bookkeeping, fill out the records, market CSA shares…
Likewise, our employees want to get their jobs done - they want to bag the spinach, pick the chard, transplant the broccoli, rather than keeping the records and adjusting the transplanter.
Too often, critical tasks end up being “not the job.” I’ve seen large farms without records, discovered fields of freshly transplanted lettuce with the top of the soil block sticking out of the soil, and irrigation running with only half of the sprinklers turning - but at least the water was on, the lettuce wasn’t in the greenhouse, and the crops were getting harvested!
On my own farm, critical tasks often didn’t get the attention they were due, because they were treated as extras until the moment they had to be done - writing CSA newsletters, bookkeeping, greasing zerks on machinery, even the record-keeping (and we had a reputation to uphold!).
It didn’t change until we began to make things “part of the job.” Rather than writing CSA newsletters after the kids were in bed the night before deliveries, we began to dedicate time early in the week. I set up a system to rapidly sort bills and receipts as they came in to make bookkeeping easier, and set aside an hour a week to entering them into QuickBooks. We developed a system of written plans and instructions that were incorporated into the same sheet of paper where the records were kept, so that the record-keeping was already in the same place as the work that was being done.
We also worked to be clear about what the job actually was: harvest wasn’t finished until the quantities and fields were recorded in the right place; and we stopped just “getting the lettuce out” and “getting the irrigation running” and started defining what done looked like.
To make something “part of the job,” you need to do one of two things: dedicate time and resources, or make the task inseparable from the work.
Likewise, our employees want to get their jobs done - they want to bag the spinach, pick the chard, transplant the broccoli, rather than keeping the records and adjusting the transplanter.
Too often, critical tasks end up being “not the job.” I’ve seen large farms without records, discovered fields of freshly transplanted lettuce with the top of the soil block sticking out of the soil, and irrigation running with only half of the sprinklers turning - but at least the water was on, the lettuce wasn’t in the greenhouse, and the crops were getting harvested!
On my own farm, critical tasks often didn’t get the attention they were due, because they were treated as extras until the moment they had to be done - writing CSA newsletters, bookkeeping, greasing zerks on machinery, even the record-keeping (and we had a reputation to uphold!).
It didn’t change until we began to make things “part of the job.” Rather than writing CSA newsletters after the kids were in bed the night before deliveries, we began to dedicate time early in the week. I set up a system to rapidly sort bills and receipts as they came in to make bookkeeping easier, and set aside an hour a week to entering them into QuickBooks. We developed a system of written plans and instructions that were incorporated into the same sheet of paper where the records were kept, so that the record-keeping was already in the same place as the work that was being done.
We also worked to be clear about what the job actually was: harvest wasn’t finished until the quantities and fields were recorded in the right place; and we stopped just “getting the lettuce out” and “getting the irrigation running” and started defining what done looked like.
To make something “part of the job,” you need to do one of two things: dedicate time and resources, or make the task inseparable from the work.
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