In a large university, it is easy to feel like a passenger in a massive administrative machine. We often find ourselves waiting for a central system upgrade or a top-down initiative to fix our workflows. But while we wait for macro-level changes, our time is being chipped away by micro-level inefficiencies—the things we actually control but often feel we aren’t allowed to change.

In an era of tightening budgets, we may not always have the resources to add more to our teams, but we always have the authority to remove what is no longer working.

Continuous improvement isn’t about adding more to your plate; it’s about administrative agency. It’s about looking at your own sphere of influence—your meetings, your inbox, and your departmental habits—and asking: Is this the best use of our expertise?

The Efficiency Trap

We are often conditioned to be analytical people. When a process becomes cumbersome, our instinct is to try to do it faster or buy a better tool. This is the Efficiency Trap: making a redundant task more efficient instead of simply eliminating it.

Real improvement in a university setting often looks like subtraction. It is the quiet act of removing the “administrative sediment” that has settled over our workflows, allowing us to return to the high value work we were hired to do.

Three Quiet Actions for Monday Morning

You don’t need a budget or a committee to reclaim your time. You can start by applying these three subtraction tools to your own routine:

1. The Collaborative Pause: Is there a weekly update or spreadsheet that feels like a “zombie process”? Before you spend hours on it, ask the recipient: Is this data still serving a specific purpose, or can we try a one-cycle pause to see if we miss it?
   Often, we continue processes out of a misplaced sense of duty, not realizing the recipient might not even open the file.
2. The 22/45 Rule: Kill the 60-minute meeting default. Shift your invites to 22 or 45 minutes. This breaks the cycle of back-to-back fatigue and creates white space to think and act on what was just discussed.
3. The “CC” Diet: Email bloat is often a symptom of unclear ownership. We CC the whole department to stay safe, but we end up stealing five minutes of focus from twenty people. Include only those who have a specific action to take.

Expanding the Sphere of Control

These are just three ideas within your immediate control. There are dozens of other quiet actions that require no permission:

1. The Template Fix: Turning the instructions you type ten times a week into a 30-second text snippet.
2. The One-In, One-Out Rule: Retiring one internal report for every new one suggested.
3. The Decision-Only Agenda: Refusing to use a meeting for something that could have been a three-sentence email.

The Question of Value

Continuous improvement isn’t a corporate initiative; it’s an act of respect for our collective time. When we strip away the work about work, we aren’t just shortening to-do lists—we’re redirecting energy toward the student outcomes and research breakthroughs that define this institution.

Every hour reclaimed from a zombie process is an hour reinvested in a student’s success or a faculty member’s discovery.

What else are we doing simply because it’s Tuesday? Which legacy habits are waiting to be retired in your corner of campus? The most impactful improvements don’t start with a committee—they start with the decision to stop doing what no longer adds value.