Cannabis peeps, where did all the time go?

“So much time to make up everywhere you turn, time we have wasted on the way…” Wasted on the Way, Crosby, Stills & Nash

Cannabis managers regularly lament that they do not have enough hours in the day to properly do their jobs.  A hidden but major root cause of this problem are the organizational expectations around their tasks.  I am referring to the amount of time an employee is expected to devote to non-essential but time-intensive activities such as checking & correcting emails, logging in to computers and crafting memos & presentations. 

Fortunately, people have quantified the amount of wasted time. (The hassle would be incalculable).

Last year, the Maryland and Delaware Enterprise University Partnership published a study on managerial worker productivity.  The study undertook a time-use survey of 5,000 office workers in America and Britain. The research looked at the amount of time people wasted each day on pointless but often necessary activities (excluding meetings, which have mixed value).

Performing a number of routine actions has a major impact on a worker’s time: 

The typical employee spends 145 days of their working life over a 45-year career logging into some device or computer. This time-suck includes remembering and updating passwords.   A similar number of days is annoyingly spent staring at a screen waiting for something to happen like a reboot or a web page to load.

Correcting typos take up an average of 20 minutes in every worker’s day, or the equivalent of 180 days over their career. “Thnaks” is the worst offender followed by “teh”, “yuo” and “remeber”. The amount of time the average worker spends typing “Bets wishes” (my bête noire) would be measured in days.

Deleting emails will consume approximately six weeks of their working life.

Not surprisingly, unproductive time increases exponentially when the person is reformatting documents, adding graphics to decks or finding the [formula error] needle in the [spreadsheet] haystack.

Mitigating this frustrating ‘death by a thousand cuts’ is not easy but it is possible.  Forget trying to get people to improve their typing, spelling or computer skills. The organization needs to adjust their expectations around role requirements, daily practices and deliverables.  For example:

1) Insist on a quick phone call or text, instead of email;

2) Recognize that ‘great is the enemy of good’ when it comes to
formatting decks and documents;
   
3) Be ruthless in terms of the time spent checking emails, Slack etc.;
 
4) Encourage the use of notebooks for capturing noncritical information;

5) Be judicious with meeting invites as well as ccing non-essential people;

6) Standardize on common tools & applications versus chasing the latest technology.

#timemanagement #productivity #leadership #culture #organizationaldevelopment #IT #performancemeasurement