There is an old joke about a man hired to paint lane lines on a highway. The first day he painted a line about a mile long, the second day only a half mile, by the third just a quarter of a mile. At the end of the week his boss asked, "What happened? You started out great, but every day you paint less and less." His reply: "I keep getting farther from the paint can!"

I thought of this joke recently when I was helping an agent with a question he had about his agency management software. In the course of answering his question, I mentioned a fairly common feature. The agent got excited and said, "I didn't know you could do that!" He had been doing things the hard way when a quicker and easier solution was right in front of him.

We've all been guilty of something like this at one time or another. We're all so busy doing the task in front of us that we don't take time to see if there is a better or more efficient way to do our jobs.