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Two days ago I reached a fork in the road at work. I was making a lot of "mistakes" and those are unacceptable in my type of work. It was either I improved and started to not commit so much errors or I could possibly lose my job. My last blog, this will give you a decent background explaining where my state of mind was in the beginning of this week. It also provides a brief explanation of what exactly it is that I do and what a "mistake" or error is.
I have currently gone three days without making any mistakes. This is a huge accomplishment over past times where I would commit a mistake just about every other day. My goal for this month was to go mistake free for at least 30 days. Sadly that goal only withstood two days of work. I contemplated a lot as to how to improve myself and mirror my co workers amazing work performance. I was given a lot of help from my brother and just co workers in general.
I am pretty sure my brother hit the nail on the head when he said" I think your problem is that you pay to much attention to other people." During the work day I could recall who had lapped me and even had a rough estimate of the amount of pallets they had finished. In that time I spent watching them I could of easily picked the wrong item or wrong amount. I put my head down and started to solely focus on my own work and not worry to much about others. I believe this has helped tremendously. I also changed my diet a little bit to lighter and more readily sources of natural energy. Instead of drinking energy drinks/coffee, I eat granola or energy chews(still not that great of a diet). I would drink pre-workout before work, but I need something that will hold me over for at least 4 hours with no crash effect. Since we usually work 10 hour shifts.
Our warehouse manager holds a meeting everyday before we actually start work. Everyone that is a picker must attend. There is only about 10 employees who aren't pickers. There are about a total of 40 pickers currently, I am one of them. During that meeting our boss discusses mistakes and his thoughts. He took a new employee to show him the item that he had picked wrongly and returned from the aisle 5 minutes later alone. Keep in mind that our warehouse is huge. He then continued to explain that the employee he had just had a talk with he had to fire. So far since I have been with the company 7 people have been fired. Job security is pretty slim, but the money is good. All it takes is one bad day and you won't have a job come tomorrow. I just keep telling myself no mistakes over and over. It helps to re-center my focus and reiterates my current goal. Just need to put my thoughts down somewhere to look back at. Any food or diet suggestions are greatly appreciated!
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how the fuck do they know every mistake you make?
how much do you get paid? pm me if you dont want it public
did you sleep more? do you play games/sc/dota/watch streams?
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This looks like some pretty shitty management if you ask me.
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Shitty job moreso than management imho, but whatever if you need the money and can spare some weeks of your life. But if I were you I would definely start looking in other directions and try to get somewhere else where you can get a better job without needing to sacrifice your mental health and wellbeing in order to just not get fired.
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On July 11 2014 02:46 FFGenerations wrote:
how the fuck do they know every mistake you make?
how much do you get paid? pm me if you dont want it public
did you sleep more? do you play games/sc/dota/watch streams?
They know every mistake we made because either the customer sends them an email stating that they got the wrong product or the driver delivering your pallet will email the manager. I actually haven't changed my sleep schedule just my mentality and a slight change in diet. I do play League of Legends and watch streams every other day. I average about 60,000 a year. It's actually not crappy management. It's pretty much just what the job entails. You must be able to work fast and accurate, which is pretty hard.
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TLADT24920 Posts
hmm sounds like an interesting job though the job security part is definitely a bit scary. I think focus and sleep are your best bet in this case. I saw that you were sleeping only 5 hours? I mean, it's great if you can work efficiently and feel energetic with that much sleep but honestly, if I get anywhere less than 7-8, I'm more likely to make more silly mistakes that wouldn't happen if I got proper sleep.
I think focus is also important. Just ignore what your coworkers are doing and focusing on what you have to do. Who cares how many pallets they do per hour? What matters is that you do what is required as efficiently as possible without making a mistake. Watching them distracts you and wastes your time as well. I would avoid taking any medications to help you out. Just sleeping more and a better diet helps. For diet, fruits and vegetables can work wonders. It should be pretty easy to just grab an apple, banana, peach etc... and eat it in the car ride there or at lunch break. Something like a salad is also easy to make, can be eaten rather quickly and you'll feel better as well. Granola bars aren't bad in general but you don't want to eat too much of them either. Make sure to keep hydrated and some meats is needed in your diet for iron and Vitamin B12.
It's great that you've went three days without an errors and I'm sure you can keep it up if you just focus on doing your best. Best of luck! 
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Tough to really give advice because it's more a focus thing.Maybe make sure you leave your mobile phone at home or something so it doesn't bug with you with messages and such.
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On July 12 2014 22:23 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:
Tough to really give advice because it's more a focus thing.Maybe make sure you leave your mobile phone at home or something so it doesn't bug with you with messages and such.
I have my phone at all times on my lift like everyone else. I use it to listen to music sometimes. I am fine with focusing and it being there. I never use it unless I am on break or on lunch.
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i have a job that has similar focus requirements (needing to maintain a fast pace, all my work being checked for errors, needing to have 100% focus my whole shift) - except instead of a warehouse, I'm in an office reviewing 3000-4000 pages of documents per day
i dont know how similar the kinds of focus that we need are, but something that i've noticed in my time doing what i do is that there are specific states of mind while you work and you need to do your hardest to get into "the zone" where you are able to concentrate with very little effort and just knock through things. once you get into your zone then you just need to do what you need to do to stay in it (there are days when im working at 200%+ productivity for the first 4-5 hours) - eventually you learn your own tips and tricks but things that have helped me:
1. i do some basic meditation techniques to try and help improve my focus
2. when i first begin to notice my focus slip, i step away for a moment to focus on my breathing
3. if a task begins to take me longer than expected then i move onto a different task and come back to it later
4. if my focus slips and i cant regain it i will either take a break for however long i need to calm down or i will continue to work but in a very conscious and "mechanical" way where i try to list in my head specifically what im doing and what i need to do next
music sometimes helps, sometimes it doesnt. its usually a good thing, as long as you are playing what you need to listen to at that moment
maintaining your "zone" is probably the most important thing.
also, as someone who has been doing something similar for almost 2 years now, money is nice but you should try to look for new opportunities or at least have a plan and work towards your plan that doesn't include continuing this kind of work. it's incredibly draining, even when you get to the point where you can autopilot and still exceed expectations - especially in an environment where you have seemingly very little security
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On July 13 2014 02:39 AiurZ wrote:
i have a job that has similar focus requirements (needing to maintain a fast pace, all my work being checked for errors, needing to have 100% focus my whole shift) - except instead of a warehouse, I'm in an office reviewing 3000-4000 pages of documents per day
i dont know how similar the kinds of focus that we need are, but something that i've noticed in my time doing what i do is that there are specific states of mind while you work and you need to do your hardest to get into "the zone" where you are able to concentrate with very little effort and just knock through things. once you get into your zone then you just need to do what you need to do to stay in it (there are days when im working at 200%+ productivity for the first 4-5 hours) - eventually you learn your own tips and tricks but things that have helped me:
1. i do some basic meditation techniques to try and help improve my focus
2. when i first begin to notice my focus slip, i step away for a moment to focus on my breathing
3. if a task begins to take me longer than expected then i move onto a different task and come back to it later
4. if my focus slips and i cant regain it i will either take a break for however long i need to calm down or i will continue to work but in a very conscious and "mechanical" way where i try to list in my head specifically what im doing and what i need to do next
music sometimes helps, sometimes it doesnt. its usually a good thing, as long as you are playing what you need to listen to at that moment
maintaining your "zone" is probably the most important thing.
also, as someone who has been doing something similar for almost 2 years now, money is nice but you should try to look for new opportunities or at least have a plan and work towards your plan that doesn't include continuing this kind of work. it's incredibly draining, even when you get to the point where you can autopilot and still exceed expectations - especially in an environment where you have seemingly very little security
I feel like the only aspect that is similar is the focus levels between our jobs. The type of work is completely different. Music actually helps me get a good rhythm going and focus. It helps me to zone out my surroundings. I am not looking elsewhere for opportunities since I just got this job. i have only been here for a month. I already know of similar jobs, but at different companies which are union. So I would get paid a lot better and have wayyyyyyy more job security. I just need to get at least six months of experience under my belt before I plan on moving to a better company.
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EPT
