Frittering the time away
Does your company pay as much attention to wasted time as wasted money? I doubt it. Sure, we can throw around the phrase “time is money” but usually in an attempt to tell someone that they’re wasting our time.
We have financial reports, ROI, annualized savings, and mechanism after mechanism to measure the money. Time is like money. We waste money; we waste time. We budget money; we budget time. We invest money; we invest time. But if time is money, then why don’t we spend nearly as much time managing it. Time waste is worse. Henry Ford knew this:
“Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes, and the hardest to correct, is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.â€
We don’t get the wasted time back. You can always find more money. No, it may not be easy, but there is more money. Once time is wasted, it is gone…forever. The Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland had a pretty clear message:
“If you knew time as well as I do,†said the hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it.â€
I had to follow a Twitter post about frittering time, perhaps because so many business executives and managers question the value of this social media thing when there’s so much real work to do (as they sit in meetings fiddling with their Blackberries). It has always fascinated me how people (and companies) choose to allocate their time. People’s time is so tightly managed on the factory floor, but that quarter hour-by-quarter hour discipline gradually evaporates up the management tree, where long hours for long hours sake are rewarded.
I had to follow a Twitter post about frittering time, perhaps because so many business executives and managers question the value of this social media thing when there’s so much real work to do (as they sit in meetings fiddling with their Blackberries). It has always fascinated me how people (and companies) choose to allocate their time. People’s time is so tightly managed on the factory floor, but that quarter hour-by-quarter hour discipline gradually evaporates up the management tree, where long hours for long hours sake are rewarded.
I had to follow a Twitter post about frittering time, perhaps because so many business executives and managers question the value of this social media thing when there’s so much real work to do (as they sit in meetings fiddling with their Blackberries). It has always fascinated me how people (and companies) choose to allocate their time. People’s time is so tightly managed on the factory floor, but that quarter hour-by-quarter hour discipline gradually evaporates up the management tree, where long hours for long hours sake are rewarded.
A major incongruency in healthcare:
1) Management cares so intensely about labor cost (70% of many hospitals’ total cost) and they’ll do a million short-sighted things to cut costs in the short-term (like sending nurses home two hours early when census is low).
2) Yet, they ignore the HOURS that a typical nurse wastes each day because of bad systems and processes. The same waste, day in and day out because people are fire fighting and not improving the underlying process.
Hence the opportunity for Lean! Fix the process… quality, patient safety, and employee engagement all improvement… and surprise, surprise cost is lower. More so than when they focus on cost.
A major incongruency in healthcare:
1) Management cares so intensely about labor cost (70% of many hospitals’ total cost) and they’ll do a million short-sighted things to cut costs in the short-term (like sending nurses home two hours early when census is low).
2) Yet, they ignore the HOURS that a typical nurse wastes each day because of bad systems and processes. The same waste, day in and day out because people are fire fighting and not improving the underlying process.
Hence the opportunity for Lean! Fix the process… quality, patient safety, and employee engagement all improvement… and surprise, surprise cost is lower. More so than when they focus on cost.
A major incongruency in healthcare:
1) Management cares so intensely about labor cost (70% of many hospitals’ total cost) and they’ll do a million short-sighted things to cut costs in the short-term (like sending nurses home two hours early when census is low).
2) Yet, they ignore the HOURS that a typical nurse wastes each day because of bad systems and processes. The same waste, day in and day out because people are fire fighting and not improving the underlying process.
Hence the opportunity for Lean! Fix the process… quality, patient safety, and employee engagement all improvement… and surprise, surprise cost is lower. More so than when they focus on cost.
I’m astonished at the cavalier attitude towards time I see at all companies. Non-value added activities — or for that matter, inactivity (e.g., waiting for a meeting to start) consume a huge percentage of executive and managerial time. And yet because it’s so difficult to quantify (most people rebel at the thought of keeping a time log for a week or even a couple of days) they accept this waste as “just the way things are.”
The latitude to define your own day and set your own schedule is a two-edged sword: you can quickly respond to problems, but it’s often difficult to stay focused on the value-added work.
I’m astonished at the cavalier attitude towards time I see at all companies. Non-value added activities — or for that matter, inactivity (e.g., waiting for a meeting to start) consume a huge percentage of executive and managerial time. And yet because it’s so difficult to quantify (most people rebel at the thought of keeping a time log for a week or even a couple of days) they accept this waste as “just the way things are.”
The latitude to define your own day and set your own schedule is a two-edged sword: you can quickly respond to problems, but it’s often difficult to stay focused on the value-added work.
I’m astonished at the cavalier attitude towards time I see at all companies. Non-value added activities — or for that matter, inactivity (e.g., waiting for a meeting to start) consume a huge percentage of executive and managerial time. And yet because it’s so difficult to quantify (most people rebel at the thought of keeping a time log for a week or even a couple of days) they accept this waste as “just the way things are.”
The latitude to define your own day and set your own schedule is a two-edged sword: you can quickly respond to problems, but it’s often difficult to stay focused on the value-added work.