The Importance of Doing it Right the First Time

I hope you had a great week! So this past week I volunteered at a kitchen in Washington DC where we prepared meals for the homeless. I volunteered with my good friend Angela, along with 15 other volunteers from around DC. It was an awesome experience and it warmed my heart to know that a few more people were going to be able to eat dinner this past Tuesday night.

Angela and I were assigned to the pasta bolognese station. Our new friend Winnie (who we met there) was in charge of scooping the pasta, I was in charge of lining the beef patties on top of the pasta, and Angela was the gravy lady who poured the gravy on top of the pasta and beef patties. We had our system down pat and our goal was to assemble 96 large trays of pasta bolognese which would equate to 2300 servings!

However, in the middle of the job, we noticed something odd. As we were pulling off the beef patties from the baking pan (which were prepared the day before by another set of volunteers) and transferring them to the actual pasta dishes that we were preparing, we noticed the beef patties started to become totally inconsistent in size and shape.

When we had first started, the beef patties were about 1.5-2″ in diameter, perfectly round and perfectly cooked (which was the correct way to prepare the patties). Once we got to the middle trays, the beef patties were about 3-4″ in diameter (which is huge compared to 1.5-2″), nowhere near a round shape, and slightly burnt.

James, the supervisor of the kitchen, had noticed this as he was walking around making sure everyone was doing their job correctly. When he saw this inconsistency in the beef patties he immediately said,“The problem here is that the volunteers yesterday assembling and cooking the patties got too comfortable with their job and slacked off.”

It’s almost as if the previous volunteers started off motivated, but then half-way through they lost their momentum, which resulted in the inconsistencies of the beef patties.

Now, obviously the shape of the beef patties isn’t really a big deal. It all cooks together in the end. However, the size of the beef patties is important, not to mention that they were slightly burnt. .You see, each tray of pasta we assembled was supposed to be a certain size and have the same amount of beef patties. For example, we were told to put 25 beef patties per tray (assuming each beef patty was around 1.5-2″ in diameter).

However, when you start to have a combination of various sized beef patties (some tiny and some ginormous), it gets tricky on how many beef patties to add per tray. And when it gets tricky, you have to make sure you are portioning out the food evenly to have to enough to fill 96 large trays. Because if you don’t fill 96 trays, that means some people aren’t eating dinner tonight.

All of this equated to extra time spent figuring out how to perfectly portion each tray to make sure we had enough food to feed everyone..

However, this extra time spent and decrease in productivity could have been prevented had the previous volunteers stayed consistent with preparing the beef patties at 2″ in diameter.

Since our shift ended at noon, we didn’t get a chance to see how many trays were actually finished or how many beef patties we were short.

However, what I do know is that when you slack off in certain tasks (and this can happen when you get too comfortable), it always comes back to you to fix. Or in this case, the burden to fix something came upon us.

The lesson here is this: Do it right the first time.

Now of course sometimes you might not know how to do it right the first time. And that’s okay. Sometimes it takes us multiple times to get something right. Just last week I redid a certain payroll task at least five times before I finally got it right. That’s the way you learn – by failing forward.

On the other hand, if you know what you’re doing (and clearly the volunteers knew what they were doing since they had it right in the beginning), do it right the first time. If you find you’re losing momentum because it’s a mundane task that you’re bored with, take a short break to regain energy or find a way to make it fun to sustain the excitement.

What you shouldn’t do is continue doing something half-heartedly. Give it your all — all the time.