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I love this story Mitchell! So much good stuff in it. I'm just old enough to remember triplicate forms, but I think the real triumph was getting police officers to adopt MS Access. In addition to the technical skill needed to craft the software solution, selling the new process to the police force might be the highest leverage work of all. Thanks for sharing!

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...videos are looking so great J...what was the 9 mo. running plan you wrote out?...

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This is a great perspective on prioritizing work, Jon! The way you call out procrastination made me chuckle. It's so true! There is a fine line between building that sexy tool and just putting getting things done.

My favorite high leverage work story involves automating the record-keeping portion of the Latent Fingerprint Section of the Philadelphia Police Department in the mid '90's. We were still typing reports in triplicate, which meant that a single typo would often require us to retype the entire report. I used Microsoft Access to make perfect imitations of our official forms, then taught the squad how to type in their reports and print out as many copies as they needed.

This was all part of a massive automation project that increased productivity exponentially. The beauty of it was that I was able to help other sections automate their work, too.

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