“I figured you would enjoy this one.” That was Jim’s message to me that accompanied a link to a column that appeared in The New York Times online. Jim Sulecki, now our e-media director, hired me 10 years ago. So he knows what gets me riled. The subject of the column was “meetings.”
Around here, I’ve been known to be a little more than harsh about the necessity of gathering the masses into meeting rooms to have discussions about topics or initiatives that will end without champions, resolution, or respect for its allotted time slot. I exaggerate for effect, because the ill effects of a bad meeting tend to overshadow the memories of well run and productive sessions, but it’s still an issue of some measure.
What I found particularly appealing about this column written by Reid Hastie, a professor at the University of Chicago, was his drilling straight down past the symptom of a deeper problem and through to the problem itself: the lack of respect for time.
“In business, we like to convert time to money, and the reverse,” writes Hastie. “But in practice, time and money are different. We can get more money, save it, move it between accounts, and use it on demand. These operations don’t apply easily to time.
“Time is the most perishable good in the world, and it is not replenishable,” Hastie continues. “You can’t earn an extra hour to use on a busy day.” Yet, he points out, people maintain the feeling that there is plenty of time ahead of us in the future, making us fritter away the here and now. We “carelessly steal it from our families, friends, or ourselves when we come up short at the end of a workday and need to stay an extra hour.”
Just reading this again as I type it in is motivating me to be more proactive. Hastie notes that bad meetings tend to be a self-fulfilling prophesy of inactivity, leading the participants to feel powerless to change course and no one to feel responsible for fixing the issue. Unfortunately, passion about the value of time is precisely what is needed.
Imagine if we treated time with the same attention as we do the P&L on a daily basis. Imagine having to go before a meeting of your peers and needing to defend your use of every hour of every day. Unless you’re a lawyer or other professional that tracks “billable hours,” you’re probably not in that meeting.
There was a time in my young career that I took a suggestion from a time management seminar and kept a time journal of my work activities each day for a week. Then I divided up the time spent on each activity and figured out where my time was spent … then I compared it to my actual job description.
I even took it a step further and shared the journal results with my boss. It made for a great conversation about department resources, our goals, and my day-to-day responsibilities.
Admittedly it was not a perfect experiment — the sheer fact that you have to write down and be accountable for the activity makes you think twice about what you’re doing. But suddenly, you find yourself treating time the way it should be treated: a finite commodity of immense value.
However you do it, I recommend you reassess your company culture on time. Reinforce time as an asset every bit as valuable as the almighty dollar.
