Featured essay

Early in my career, I got called into my boss’s office because I “didn’t look busy enough.” I managed open-store remodels, and a lot of the work repeated from one project to the next, so I built an Excel spreadsheet to make things faster. I could enter the information from a site inspection, then get a quote, an ordering checklist, and a schedule for all the moving parts. Each day, I checked what had been ordered, shipped, delivered, and completed. After I addressed the exceptions, I was ca