Lessons from Lego
When my brother asked me to take on a ‘challenge’, I thought I knew what I was taking on but I don’t think I fully appreciated the extent of the challenge and I certainly did not expect to come away from it learning a little more about myself and my skill set.
Let me set the scene. My role had been made redundant and I was a couple of weeks into leaving my role. At the same time, we were about a month into lockdown so I was confined to my home, with no work and having cleaned and reorganised my home, I was running out of things to do. My sleeping pattern was erratic at best and I needed something to keep my mind occupied, so I thought, why not?
As you’ve probably gathered, this had something to do with Lego. My brother and young nephew love Lego - and that’s probably understating it! Over the years, they have accumulated a large collection of Lego sets which were now unbuilt for the most part, and the pieces were all mixed up together. I knew they had a LOT of Lego, but nothing prepared me for the volume of Lego that was going to overtake my living room. There were large boxes, small boxes and tubs of it, and it was everywhere! There was also a very large box just full of instruction books. Hopefully, that gives an indication of the scale of the task, it sure hit home for me at that point - I was going to be ‘living in the land of Lego’ for weeks!
When it all finally arrived, I was like a woman on a mission. I was a little excited to be doing something and I never shied away from a bit of graft, but very soon, then reality kicked in. There was SO much of it and I didn’t know where to start. I’ll admit, for a moment, I did feel a bit overwhelmed.
Now, I’ll give my brother some credit, he had started to separate the pieces into tubs of colour but it was far from finished. I tried to get started by building models that he’d already started, but I couldn’t find any of the pieces to complete the model - and it was frustrating. It needed to be sorted out before I could even begin to attempt to build anything. I’d realised in my initial attempt that there were too many variations of pieces and some of them were tiny. I would never find them among the all the larger pieces. Whilst splitting them into colours was good, for the number of pieces I had that wasn’t a good enough strategy. I chose to break it down by type rather than colour. I wanted to be able to find the pieces I needed easily and felt this was the best way to achieve it. It took 4 full days to organise all the pieces…I’d start about 8am and keep going (with a couple of refreshment breaks) until I couldn’t function, which was normally about 11pm. I’d set myself little targets to hit and to keep me motivated, I’d only gather a reasonable amount of pieces to work through. I kept telling myself ‘it will be easier once you get this done’, over and over to keep me going. I knew this already, but at times I felt like I was drowning in a sea of Lego.
Once the pieces were organised, I sorted the books. For the Lego fans out there, I had pretty much most varieties of sets from Lego City, Lego Creator, Lego Star Wars, Lego Technic, Lego Ninjago and a fair few others. There were a number of books missing but I wasn’t worried because I knew I could access the instructions online but I needed to know what I was building in the first place!
With that, it was time to build. I didn’t ease myself into this at all. I felt the best place for me to start was the one with the biggest and most pieces – Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer. This was a bit of a beast with approx. 1400 pieces, 60cm long, 38cm wide and 22cm tall. In my defence, my thinking was ‘If I build this one, it uses lots of the pieces I have and maybe create more space’. Theoretically, that makes perfect sense but in reality, it felt and looked like I hadn’t event made a dent in the volume of Lego I had surrounding me.
Once I started, I was committed. I was pulling similar hours as I did when I was organising the pieces and it was coming together. I had been warned that there may be pieces missing and to collate the information together and we’d replace them. I started to note it down on a bit of paper the codes and a description and at the end I would add it all to a spreadsheet. Now here is where I went a step further (or too far some would say). I would also take a food bag labelled with the name and model number and add my loose pieces for that particular model. With that a post it note with the code of the piece and the instruction number from the book to where in the process it was to be added. Geeky? Maybe, but I knew I would never remember where I was in the process so wanted something to remind me.
No good project doesn’t have a way to measure progress and success and mine was no exception. I also had a list of all the models I was working on and the progress…and my completion rate. Too far? Certainly not for me! I wanted to see progress build – just like the Lego models that I was surrounded by, slowly growing and heading for completion. How far I’d come, where each set was at and what lay ahead. I would get joy from seeing the percentage completion going up each time I completed a full set.
Let’s fast forward a little. I systematically worked my way through all the different sets, making a list of missing pieces. The ones I completed stayed in the food bag with the instruction book and in my completed pile ready to go back. The extra pieces I needed arrived in stages and in turn they were finished and sent back. I found myself left with a number of pieces that I had no books for and no model number, but they were significant enough pieces for me to believe they belonged to another set. My curious nature kicked in as I began to investigate where they could come from. It took some doing but I eventually found the relevant models and was able to build the sets.
I’m now at the last stage. I started with 76 sets – might I add, that’s not all of them! Some were left with my nephew so he has something to play with. So, I started with 76 sets, I have completed 65. I am waiting on the last lot of pieces to arrive and then it will be complete. Whilst I haven’t finished. I’ve already thought about what I would do differently, and I also know what I am glad to have done. It would be really cliché to say ‘every day is a learning day’ but in this case it kind of was. After all this, what are the takeaways?
Take your time – Sometimes, going slower allows you to go faster. Errors cost just as much in time as anything else and in my case, it sometimes resulted in undoing some of the work I had done to correct it.
It’s okay to do things differently – We don’t have to all do things the same way to produce the result needed. My brothers method of organising may have worked for him, it just didn’t work for me in my environment. We all have our individual working styles and we should embrace it. At the end of the day, it’s just down to personal preference.
Get organised – I like to be organised so I approached this in a similar fashion to a business project. I had a plan of what I needed to do and how I was going to go about it. I did have a false start, but I took the learning and adapted quickly.
Set mini goals – These keep you motivated when the task in front of you is feels big. I would have a mini celebration in my head every time I hit a target and the more I did it, the more it felt as though I was accomplishing something.
Look after yourself – I worked some silly hours doing this and made mistakes as a result of it. Not only that, it eventually catches up with you and you find yourself in an exhausted state. I certainly did!
I’m a completer-finisher and proud of it – I could not have got through this project without this trait and it was the thing pushing me along to keep going. It was also the thing that caused my frustration when I didn’t have the pieces I needed! Every trait has it’s pros and cons.
Lego is therapeutic – I got lost in a world of Lego. Hours would pass by and I wouldn’t even notice. I appreciate this has both good and bad points but for me, it was …nice. It’s been a while since I got lost in something I was doing and enjoying it at the same time.
I needed this – In a time where we were in lockdown, I live alone and just out of a job, I needed something to keep me going, upbeat and help me get through this period in time and this ‘challenge’ hit the mark. It gave me a sense of achievement. Something to get out of bed for. The timing was perfect.
