No more 'firefighting' – task system in 14 days
Constant phone calls, emails marked 'for yesterday,' and employees who don't know what to grab first. This was the reality in the Architex design office in Poznan before our visit in October 2024. In just 14 days, we showed them that chaos is not inherent to the industry, but merely results from the lack of a single, common list of priorities.
Why 347 emails a day is an alarm signal
At Architex, 14 people worked, and each received an average of 26 messages a day requiring immediate reaction. When we started the audit on October 7, it turned out that most of these matters were trivialities that could wait. The problem was that no one knew what was truly important. Marek Pawlak, the company owner, spent 3.2 hours a day just distributing work instead of acquiring new contracts for the office.
Analysis showed that 68% of the team's working time was interrupted by sudden questions from colleagues at the next desk. Each such interruption breaks rhythm for at least 11 minutes. This meant that realistically, no one worked in focus for longer than an hour a day. We counted every zloty wasted on these downtimes and the result was terrifying – the company lost nearly 4,280 PLN a week just because tasks 'hung' in the air rather than in the system. Facts on the table: without a clear list, work becomes a fight for survival.
Marek Pawlak spent 3.2 hours a day distributing work instead of earning money for the company.
First 7 days: Great head cleaning
We started with a simple rule: if a task isn't in the system, it doesn't exist. For the first seven days, we focused on pulling all the 'hanging' matters out of employees' heads and inboxes. We gathered 412 unique tasks, from construction projects to ordering plotter paper. We divided them into three simple columns: To Do, In Progress, Done. No complicated statuses that only make life harder and force unnecessary clicking.
We also introduced a 'quiet hour' rule between 9:15 and 10:15. During this time, no one was allowed to ask anyone about anything. This was the moment for the most difficult projects. The effect? After just three days, employees noticed they were finishing work at 4:00 PM instead of 5:30 PM as before. To be honest, there was resistance at first because everyone felt 'too busy' to enter tasks into a table. However, when they saw their inboxes stopped swelling, they started monitoring the new procedure themselves.
Second week: Maintaining discipline without fluff
From October 14, 2024, we started measuring execution time. Every new order from a client first went to a 'waiting room,' where Marek assigned it a priority from 1 to 3. It turned out that 19% of matters previously deemed urgent could actually be realized within 4 business days without any damage to the relationship with the investor. This allowed the team to breathe and focus on the quality of documentation, which previously contained errors due to haste.
To keep order, we introduced short, 9-minute morning meetings over coffee. Everyone spoke only about what they planned to close today. No story-telling and no complaining. If someone had a problem, they reported it after the meeting directly to the designated person. Thanks to this, communication became surgically precise. The number of internal emails dropped from 84 to 22 per day per person in just 9 business days from the start of the implementation.
The number of internal emails dropped from 84 to 22 per day per person in just 9 business days.
Results after 14 days and what it means for you
The finale of our work in Poznan is concrete numbers, not promises. After two weeks, the Architex team recovered an average of 5.2 hours of peace per week for each employee. Inquiry response time shortened from 4 days to 47 minutes. Most importantly, Marek Pawlak regained his afternoons. Instead of staying late in the office to check if everything was done, he looks at the system once at 3:45 PM and sees green bars next to 94.6% of the tasks planned for the day.
If your company still operates on the 'who shouts loudest gets it done fastest' principle, you are losing money every day. You don't need expensive software for thousands of zlotys for this. All it takes is consistency and cutting off distractors. We at Solvium Strategia Sp. z o.o. know that the devil is in habits, not tools. By the way, most business owners fear that employees will leave when control is introduced, but it's exactly the opposite – people want to know what they have to do so they can return home in peace.
