What's your left hand doing?
A Hard Stop on Efficiency.
When I left the Marine Corps, I had a plan. The plan was that I would figure it out later — well, for the most part. After 9 years of service and only 26 years old, I did have thoughts of being a US postal worker. My grandfather, a veteran of WWII, retired from the Post Office after more than 20 years, and his father was a postman as well. As a veteran, your time in service can be added to a federal pension if you retire. So, 20 years in the post office would have bought me a 29-year retirement with my time in service added. But with more than 100 days of terminal leave (the number of vacation days I chose to use when exiting service), I figured, what's the rush?
In my infinite wisdom, I chose to attend a bartending school in Tampa, Florida, one that my wife still pokes fun at me about. The thought was to learn some new skills and have the ability to earn some cash while - "I figured it out." To my surprise, the training was actually pretty intense and highly detailed. It was a mixture of classroom learning, elements of high-end service, scenario-based training, and real-world application — needless to say, it was legit.
Beyond memorizing drink recipes, understanding laws associated with serving, and learning to simultaneously free pour with both hands from multiple bottles in varying amounts, one of the greatest lessons was efficiency. A phrase often heard from quite militant-style instructors was, "What is your left hand doing?"
For me, that question always came at a point when I thought I was crushing it. Cranking out multiple drinks, different recipes, including garnishes, cocktail napkins and stirrers, and then — “STOP!” You would be told to freeze and evaluate what you're doing, and the question would be posed, "What is your left hand doing?" Now, this didn't always imply that your left hand wasn't doing anything, which it often was, but simply a question of efficiency.
Every movement was evaluated for speed and productivity. Can you pour with both hands? Are the pours equal? Can you grab more than one bottle per hand? Can your left hand add a stirrer while your right hand adds a garnish? But it goes beyond just doing more, it's also finding inefficiencies. A common one in the bar industry is grabbing a bottle from the left side of the well with your right hand and vice versa, crossing your arms over one another. It is a small movement error but one that can be costly in speed and proficiency.
This concept is a lesson I have kept with me since I graduated from that course nearly 20 years ago — What is your left hand doing? Now, I have worked in small restaurants, Florida dive bars, and some of the biggest nightclubs in San Diego. However, that's not where this served me the most. This mindset allowed me to find better speed and efficiency as a project manager while supporting military training operations and even more effectively working as a consultant with corporate teams and executives.
"What is your left hand doing?" is not about multitasking; it's about finding similar actions that can be paired or, better yet, finding unnecessary movements that can be omitted altogether. The point of efficiency isn't to add more movements or tasks to "increase production"; it's about streamlining processes. I previously worked for a company that utilized paper contracts without an e-signature option, stored them in an online drive incompatible with their CRM, filed them by title and date only, and then had multiple spreadsheets to track information from the said contract only after it was entered manually. Their left hand wasn't helping them at all; they might have faired better by stepping back and putting their hands in their pockets.
Not to be harsh, but that's a prime example of the often wildly inefficient policies and procedures that plague our productivity. Back then, the bartender in me learned that at any moment, especially when I think I'm rocking and rolling, I should say STOP! - What is your left hand doing? More likely than not, I can find ways to streamline, kill two birds with one stone, or omit an unnecessary action altogether. We often add steps as we go, insert a new policy to remedy an issue, change a system over to new software, or be forced into something due to laws and regulations. It's this process that often finds great leaders and organizations scratching their heads on how they got so bogged down in red tape and redundancies.
Take a moment to stop and ask yourself from time to time - What's your left hand doing? This isn't about adding more or multitasking: it's about streamiling and finding an effortless flow to your productivity. Don't become obsessed with the left hand and lose sight of the mission - remember, I never became a US postal worker.
