Here’s an unscientific but important question to ask yourself: How do you feel when you walk into your work space? Your workspace could be an entire shop, or your bindery equipment work area, or an office cubicle. Do you feel good or bad about the surroundings and overall environment of the workspace? If you don’t feel good, you should pay attention. Negative feelings detract from how well you do your job.
I can already hear the protests: “I’m a creative person, comfortable in my clutter. I can find anything I need in seconds.” Or, “I can’t be something that’s opposite my personality.” The excuses are OK if you work alone and clients will never see your work area. But if you work on bindery equipment or in a print shop environment, all the excuses have to give way to seven reasons why you should be organized.
One frustrating aspect of a bindery supervisor’s job is that you often get a lot of responsibility yet have limited authority. You might be tasked each day with finishing dozens of jobs worth many thousands of dollars. Yet you have little or no say over how much time will be given your department to produce the work. Your bindery staff is probably limited, overtime spending or extra hiring requires painful authorizations, and buying additional equipment is nearly impossible.
When it comes to change, humans are an odd lot, and not just in the printing and bindery industry. Who among us has not, at some point in our lives, resisted a personal or professional change that was imposed upon us? Yet we know full well that the world, especially technology, is constantly and rapidly changing, mostly for the better.
Printers generally are a notoriously skeptical lot, me included. Many years ago when I was managing a small commercial printing company, a couple of clean-cut fellows in suits entered our shop. They said they were from the FBI and wanted to talk to the manager. I laughed a bit too heartily and replied “OK, sure you are, show me some ID.”