My Job Turned Me Into an Inflexible Robot

A Job of Procedures and Checklists on the Path to EfficiencyMy previous job as a semiconductor fab engineer came with a lot of procedures and checklists. They’re great because they both teach and remind people the proper way to do things, ensuring the task is done the same way, the best way, the safest way, the most efficient way, and the properly ordered way every time. This strategy minimizes variation in the task, in turn minimizing the amount of troubleshooting, redos, and issues later on. Awesome!The job also came with a lot of tasks. My to-do list was well over 500 non-trivial items when including projects broken down into individual subtasks, making it incredibly important that I was efficient with my time and energy throughout the workday. This may take the form of delegation, prioritization, and, you guessed it, procedures that allowed me to just do and not think.Everything became procedurized at work. Making a change to a document? Let me walk through my change-a-document…