Wasted Time
March 4, 2005
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Eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, 2400 minutes to get something done.
While I know that many of you are working many more hours each week, we
all have the same problem. Unlike hard packaged goods, our product…the
thing we sell…has an expiration date. Even the baker can sell “day-old”
bread and cupcakes, but as consultants once our billable hours pass, they
are gone forever. An unbilled hour passed is an hour (and many dollars)
lost. One can’t help but be concerned with these hours and how more
of them can be turned into productive “sales” instead of “wasted
time.”
Time flies
Where do your hours go on any given day? Do you spend hour after hour
in worthless meetings? Are you regularly stuck in traffic traveling to
a client’s office? Are minutes and hours spent waiting on a piece
of information, that part for a broken machine or someone else? Problems
large and small eat away at your time, sending more and more time down
the drain. You can imagine the distress of a manufacturer who found half
of their products never made it out of the factory. You need to be concerned
as well.
Over the last year I have been keeping some detailed statistics regarding
my work. I track not only the hours worked and the money earned, but also
the travel time and mileage for each call. Despite my best efforts, it
is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to come anywhere close to 40
billable hours per week. As a consultant, travel time eats up many productive
hours a day. This is especially true if your average billable hours per
call is low. There are days I must travel 1 hour or more for a 1 hour
call. With a call like this, I lose 1 hour for every hour I work.
Sure, you can make telephone calls while in the car, think about projects
and make notes, but you can’t bill anyone directly for those hours,
at least, not in my line of work. I could attempt to start charging for
travel time, or requiring larger minimum time commitments on my clients,
but both of these solutions are sure to send clients elsewhere. This would
definitely make a bad situation even worse.
If you work in an office the same problems can occur. You may not have
to worry about travel time, but meetings, personnel issues and crises
can quickly remove hours from your day before you even notice it. This
is especially a problem when project managers estimate the time required
to complete a project. They always use the most rosy prediction of how
many hours you will spend working on the project. Then they take away
hour after hour with meetings about the vision statement, the new quality
initiative and even the failure of some people to make a new pot of coffee
when they finish the last cup. You then find yourself with 40 hours of
work to do with only 20 hours of time. No wonder projects miss their deadlines.
To Don’t List
One way to gain back some time is to create a “To Don’t”
list. The only way you can become more productive is to focus on those
things that matter most. There are some things like useless meetings,
long travel time and others that you simply need to stop doing. Every
hour you spend doing something that doesn’t directly relate to your
goals, is an hour lost. Note, I am not saying that you don’t have
a life outside the office. You should also have “To Don’t”
lists for your personal life, as well. The goal is to recapture those
wasted hours that could be better used finishing your project, learning
a new language or creating an entirely new career.
(See Tom Peters web site at http://tompeters.com/ or the PDF file at http://www.changethis.com/pdf/2.01.ThisIBelieve.pdf)
for more information on To Don’t – ing)
At work or at home, once an hour has passed, it is gone forever. Are you
spending your hours reaching for your business and personal goals, or
are you truly “killing time.” You can’t sell your “day-old”
hours at a discount. You can’t get them back by working twice as
hard. The only thing you can do is rededicate yourself to making each
and every hour count. Stop doing those things that don’t matter
to you, your company or your family. While some folks around you may complain,
your career and your life will only improve.
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