The most dangerous time thieves in your business aren’t the obviously lazy employees – they’re the ones who look incredibly dedicated while accomplishing surprisingly little. In this episode, Tonya Kubo and Gwen Bortner expose the hidden patterns of time theft that can slowly drain your business resources without you even noticing.
This is the third episode in our four-part theft series, covering energy, time, and money theft.
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The Time Thieves You Never See Coming
Normally, Tonya starts these episodes, but I’m starting it because we are doing these things live throughout the year. I have a smoke alarm that needs a battery change, and it’s at the very top of a voltage ceiling and I don’t have access to the giant ladder. I do have access to it, but no one wants me carrying in the giant ladder by myself into the house, doing all of the things. Unfortunately, the husband is out of town just until later.
It reminded both of us that we wish we lived closer to Vancouver, Washington, where our mutual friend Mary Williams has just started opening her new recording podcast studio for all of the things at Sasquatch Media Grounds. It’s one of those things that sometimes making those additional investments could pay off because if we had done that, this would be Mary’s problem and not our problem.
Mary would call the building maintenance guy because the studio is inside of a larger building. I’m like, “What would it take for us to fly to Vancouver for like a week at a time and we’ll just record at Mary’s studio?” It’d be great. I would love for this to be Mary’s problem.
I would too, but we’re not quite there yet but we’ll make it there at some point. I have that in my hope list. Given that, we’re asking all of our readers to be patient. Hopefully, we’ll be able to eliminate it mostly and it’s random.
Unmasking The Invisible Thieves: Are Your Employees Secretly Stealing Time?
We’ll do our best. With that, let’s get into this episode, which is the time thieves you never see coming. Let me set the stage for you. This is the team member. Maybe it’s a co-worker but they’re always busy and always working but somehow nothing important seems to get done. These time thieves are the team members, the employees, the contractors or subcontractors who steal your most valuable resource while looking incredibly dedicated.
They are the hardest thieves to spot because they’re not lazy. They are just spectacularly inefficient. If you’ve been tracking with us and if this is not your first episode, you will know that this is part three in a series of four where we have been talking about the little tiny thefts. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts that happen in business. The theft of your energy, the theft of time, and the theft of money. We always think about embezzlement in terms of finances. We don’t think of it though at the time and energy.
In the previous episode, we talked about energy. For this episode, I want to talk about time and what happens when those energy thieves graduate to stealing actual hours and productivity. Gwen, you were the person who first told me of your observation where you think that theft that usually ends in money, never starts with money. You have found that usually they start by stealing your energy. The next step tends to be stealing time and then it graduates to a theft of money. Tell me more about that.
The Hidden Cost Of “Efficient” Work: Why Time Is Money
The thing is we don’t try to think of time as money but if we’re paying someone to do something, time is money. That’s where it starts. I get paid to work six hours a day. I’m picking a random number. I’m efficient, so I get most of it done in five. It’s okay that I don’t do the additional hour of work because I got six hours of work done and I got it done in five. I should get the benefit of being able to not work those six hours. The truth is, that’s not what you’re getting paid for if you’re getting paid for six hours of work. We’re paying for you to be as efficient as possible throughout the entire six hours.
If what someone else does may take six hours to do, you can do it in four. We also still want you to do two more hours of work if we’re paying you for six hours. This is often where that little theft of time is and/or I run my lunch break a little bit longer. We only get 30 minutes for lunch but I usually don’t come back for 45 minutes. It’s all of these little tiny things that it’s very easy for us to justify. Usually, it’s a once or twice justification in a month and then it becomes a once or twice justification in a week then it becomes a pretty consistent justification every day.
Over time, that starts adding up bits by bits. Although we don’t think of it as stealing. It is in fact stealing if you’re getting paid for that time because you’re not doing it. The other way it happens is where we expand the work to fill the time and we’ve all done this. I’d love to say I’ve never done that but that would also be a complete and total lie. I may have a task. Bookkeeping is the one I like to go to and say, “How long does bookkeeping take?” When I have two hours, it tends to take two hours but when I only have one hour, basically, bookkeeping tends to only take one hour. Does it really take two hours or does it take one hour?
In some cases, I know I couldn’t get it done in one hour because there are some additional things and whatnot. That’s a place where we’re staying busy. We’re working all of those hours but are we working as efficiently as we possibly can? Are we getting distracted? “I need to go, look this thing up,” like what this charge was. You go look it up and it’s like, “I should check out these others.” We’ve all done that, too. All of a sudden, one thing leads to the next thing and leads to the next thing, then you’re down the rabbit hole. That’s another theft of time.
All of these are little ways that the time gets stolen and it’s hard to track. It’s not usually this big like shift from A to B. It’s these little tiny bits and just shifting a bit over a long period of time. Where we tend to find it is at the point someone leaves. All of a sudden, you’re like, “I’ve allocated all of this work to other people and I was paying for six hours of work and other people are getting all the exact same amount of work done in three.” You realize, “I was paying for six but I was only getting three.”
Employee Vs. Employer: Navigating The Tricky Terrain Of Time And Productivity
This is a tricky topic in the climate that we have. First of all, I feel like I have to say we’re talking about, in this specific case, employee relationships, because employees are paid for time. It’s $20 an hour, and your job assignment may be 20 hours a week or 30 hours a week. Whatever it may be. Maybe if you’re full-time at 40. Every state is different in the US, and there is an expectation that I get eight hours of work for eight hours of pay. Any of us who’ve worked in an office environment knows that some of us run circles around our peers.
It’s hard right to put in a full eight hours when you can see that you can do it in four hours. Would it take everybody else eight hours? It feels like you’re being punished for being more efficient. It gets dicey there. There’s also a shift in some industries of going more on pain for results. I don’t care how long it takes you. You’re paid to meet certain objectives, and if you have a four-hour workday, great and if you have an eight-hour workday, fine.
I’m going to step in just to give us a good frame around this particular episode, Gwen, and say that all of that is fine and good and highly dependent on your agreement with your employer. The purpose of this episode is to talk to the business owner. The business owner can have open eyes about what types of agreements they want to have with their team members. If you have a situation where you’ve got one employee who can do what the shop standard says. We’ll just call it the shop, the shop standard eight-hour workday.
If you’ve got one employee who can do that in four hours, then you potentially have a performance management situation on your hands with the other staff members or maybe you have a superstar who’s management material or something else. The answer to that is not to let employee A twiddle their thumbs for half a shift just because they are more productive than employee B or C. We have to step up and be real business owners and make business-owner decisions. Are we tracking each other so far?
We have to step up, be real business owners, and make business owner decisions. Share on XWhat often happens is that, I’ll say the outstanding employee realizes that they’re able to get what everyone else says eight hour work is done in six. They do feel like, “I’m being punished for being effective.” One of my favorite phrases is, Don’t reinforce bad behavior. We need to stay conscientious about that to say, “Are they doing a good job? Can we acknowledge that? Can we be watching out for those situations so that we aren’t training them to not work full-time?” At the point that we give them eight hours of work, often, they’re like, “I can’t get this much done.” I bet you can.
That becomes a whole different problem and this is something that we have seen in multiple client situations before. It was a great employee but we weren’t keeping them engaged enough and saying, “Let’s make sure that we’re keeping them engaged.” The other thing we as the business owner need to do is, we also need to own. It’s our responsibility to watch the process, the timesheets, and all of those things to be held accountable to doing that. One of the things that I see a lot of business owners do, especially when they’re first bringing in their first actual employees.
They’re not 1099. They’re not contractors who are invoicing you. You send me an invoice and I look at it. I look at the hours and say, “That all makes sense to me. I’m good with it. I pay for those hours.” I don’t expect that it’s the exact same invoice every time because I know this week school started last week, this happened, we were out sick, and all of the things. When we start getting employees, one of the things that we’ll do, even if we’re paying them hourly.
We get in the habit of saying, “They’re supposed to work 20 hours, so I’m paying them for 20 hours.” Did they work 20 hours, especially if they’re on a timesheet? Sometimes, we’re training them in bad behavior because it’s easier for us to just say, “It’s 20 hours where they reported 18 hours. What that tells them is that, we don’t care if you work 18 hours. We’re going to pay you for 20 hours.”
The Agreement Is Key: How Clear Expectations Prevent Time Theft
I’m going to keep drilling this in because I know that we have service providers who listen also who are like, “If I can get a job done in 6 hours instead of 10 hours but they would pay somebody else 10 hours. I should get the 10 hours of pay. My bank account should not suffer just because I’m better.” What I keep wanting to hone in on this is it comes down to the agreement. If you are a business owner who is like, “I am going to pay you for 20 hours a week every single pay period because that works for me. I don’t care how long it takes you to do a job so long as it gets done. I happen to know there’s going to be times where things go a little bit higher. I want to believe that it all works out in the wash and you live in a state that allows such loosey goosey behavior.”
Don't reinforce bad behavior. Share on XI do not live in such a state, but if you do, great for you. Fine, but I like to be up front about that. Also acknowledge that it’s going to be hard for you to adequately project and plan for replacing staff. If a person can get the job done in 16 hours and you’re consistently paying them for 20 hours because that is what you have budgeted for. They leave and somebody comes in who is less efficient and starts saying, “This is a 25-hour-a-week job.” You’re not going to be able to turn to them and say, “The other person got it done in 16 hours. I just paid them for 20 hours.” That doesn’t make any sense.
Back to what we’re trying to do, what this episode is to help you, as a business owner, understand the implications of not paying attention to this thing. I get it, you don’t want to deal with numbers in math. I don’t either. I paid team members on retainer for the longest time because I didn’t want to worry about it but I also found myself frustrated when things didn’t get done at certain points of time and not understanding why because I didn’t understand how much time my team was working week in and week out.
Now that we’ve put a frame around this, it’s important to recognize that time theft is tricky in the context that we’re talking about because a lot of times it looks productive on the surface. A lot of times, most theft like our most thievery happens with employees who look like they work long hours, send lots of emails, and seem dedicated. It’s when you dig deeper that the math doesn’t add up. This may be your employee who’s always racing their hand for over time. This may be your employee who wants to come in and do nights and weekends.
That sounds great because not everybody wants to do nights and weekends. People are big on boundaries these days but sometimes people like to come in on nights and weekends because there’s less oversight. Sometimes people like to come in on nights and weekends because there’s more dead time and there’s not a special project to fill it. I want to talk today about four patterns of time theft and this is going to be Gwyn talking about this but I want to have a conversation on the difference between being busy and being productive.
Gwen, I want you to talk a little bit from your experience on how these hidden costs compound over time because this is an area where you have way more experience. You’ve worked with a lot of retailers and manufacturers. You’ve seen how this cripples if it doesn’t cause a retail shop or a business with small margins and low wage workers to collapse under the weight of payroll and also how do you measure what matters. If you feel like impact matters more than time.
The other thing we, as business owners, need to own is our responsibility to watch the process, watch the timesheets—all those things we're held accountable for. Share on XHow are you managing that so that you can fairly compare employee A from employee B? With that, Gwen, here’s the patterns that I have heard you describe over the years. You can tell me if you think that they are different and then we can unpack them. The first is, Gwen would label this as the person who got you here is not necessarily the person to get you there, the next level.
There’s a ton in that in small business and it’s hard because we’re loyal to those people who got us here.
The “Old Way Is Better” Trap: How Resisting New Systems Steals Your Future
This is the person who will die on the hill of any efficiency. They want to continue using outdated systems even though you are willing to invest in better systems, adopt better systems, and train them on better systems. They insist their way is more thorough and more careful. This way has always worked. It’s not broken. Why should we fix it? They refuse to adapt to new tools or processes. They get this interesting sense of fulfillment and satisfaction overdoing things the hard way. For instance, creating a proposal from scratch when templates exist. It’s like they get a badge of honor for doing things manually, even though there are shortcuts available to them, because they just like it more. They like their way. Go ahead, Gwen.
It’s a comfort piece. This is the thing that I’m comfortable with. We’ve had multiple clients that have dealt with this and have had those folks say, “It’s like the job you hired me for doesn’t exist anymore.” The answer is that might be true. We would love for you to migrate with the business as the business is growing, changing, and doing all those things, but it doesn’t always work. The person who’s fighting the new process is always a flag. It’s always a flag.
Now, you want to double-check that you aren’t missing something in detail that they understand that you’re missing because of this new process. Most of the time, probably 90% of the time. It’s because they don’t want to do the new thing. They like their way. They’re comfortable with those things. At the same point, there’s also a whole lot of clients that we’ve had that have had employees who are like, “I’m ready to do the new thing. Let’s go for it,” and they totally migrate. It’s not that it’s always this way but it is the flag.
The person fighting a new process is always a flag for time theft. Share on XThe person who’s saying, “I don’t want to do it that way. I want to keep doing it this way.” If they don’t have a good reasoning behind it that you can get behind, it’s probably problematic. This is probably the new way for them to feel like it’s going to take longer. By the way, it will be at the beginning because we’re learning something new. Usually, what ends up happening is it’s going to save a whole lot of time in the future going forward. Maybe not now or this week or not even this month, but in a relatively short period, it is going to make things more efficient. That’s always a flag.
The other flag that’s related to that is the person who can’t tell you what they’re doing or keeps pushing off giving you the information that they should be able to give you because that’s the similar thing. You’re like, “I need this report.” We’ll pick on an easy example. You have an in-house bookkeeper and you want a P&L as it stands now, which may not be completely accurate. All of the transactions may not be in but you say, “I want to P&L now.” There’s no reason that shouldn’t be able to be done. If you’re not getting it, what it means is they don’t have any of the transactions in at all.
We’re doing this in the middle of the month. In the middle of the month, I wouldn’t necessarily expect every transaction to be there, but I would expect some of the transactions to be there. If I pulled a P&L and there were no transactions. What if I have been doing it? What have I been working on? When folks aren’t responsive in the area that they’re responsible for. That’s also usually a flag that they’ve been spending time doing other things. If what those other things are, that can be okay, if that’s well within what they’re supposed to be doing. A lot of times, it’s the things that they enjoy more or they get more satisfaction from but not necessarily what is or what they should be focused on.
Analysis Paralysis: When Over-Researching Becomes A Time Thief
We’ve talked about the people who like to die on the hill of any efficiency and you’ve talked about some other types. There’s another pattern, though, I think is common. This is the analysis paralysis pattern. This is the staff member who over researches every decision because they don’t want to make a mistake. They don’t want to make the wrong decision. They’re always asking for additional information that doesn’t change any outcomes. They’ll use perfectionism as procrastination on difficult tasks. I will tell you. I worked with somebody who was supposed to turn around to report and I found out that they were spending a whole day.
I couldn’t figure out what was taking so long because all they needed to do was throw it into Word, PDF the Word doc but they were taking all this time because they were researching color coats so that they could brand the headers. We were not in the environment that anybody needed. We just needed a black and white printout. Nobody was going to print this in color, but they wanted this to be aesthetically pleasing but that was not the assignment. That’s an example of perfectionism as procrastination.
Gwen and I talked about this a lot about over-optimization. They create these elaborate systems for simple processes. Maybe they spend six hours researching vendors or getting quotes for a purchase that’s $200. It’s like getting a couple of quotes and as long as it comes in at $200 or lower, let’s go with it. We’re not going to quibble over $5 here and $5 there.
I’ve also seen people who like paper. They’ll insist on doing everything by hand then typing that into a computer system and then they want to email that to somebody else for that person to input it into a form or something else. It’s like, why don’t you just put it into the form to begin with? I call it analysis paralysis. Maybe you’d call it like an over researcher. What would you say to this, Gwen?
For me, the paper piece is a huge one, where I’ve been comfortable with paper. I’m old, so I get it but we overpaperize it. We spend way too much time putting things on paper, getting paper copies so that we can put it in the file that we never open or that we never look at. Right. This is a common situation because there’s lots of places that will show up. It will show up as procrastination. It will show up as, “I want to make sure I get the right thing.”
One of the other things that I’ve seen also and it’s interesting because this tends to happen more with younger employees. They’re so used to having the internet and Google and YouTube that they don’t necessarily go to the support team for the software. They’ll spend time researching a problem on Google or YouTube or wherever and most software programs have some amount of support. Now, some suck, let’s just be honest. You can’t get good information there, but when you at some point say, “Why haven’t I been able to find the right answer on this?” It’s like, “Did you call for support?” “No.” It’s like, “How many hours have you spent on this?” “Three.”
The thing is, sometimes the problem is the problem with the software and the only folks that can fix it are the support people. If you are of a certain age, that wasn’t your first option. If you’re old like I am, that for a while was like your own options. It’s what you absolutely think of first. Now that there’s so much information available, we often think our best resource is to find the information ourselves, which is another form of that procrastination.
You and I were talking probably a couple of months ago now, but we also talked about the difference between reading something versus watching a video of something. You can skim through something pretty quick and find the peace that you want. Unless the video is well tagged, you’ve got to watch the whole thing, so even if it’s five minutes, let’s say. It’s not like it’s a 30-minute video. It’s just a 5-minute video. Five minutes is still five minutes where that same information is in a doc or some document. You probably could have skimmed through and figured it out in a minute or two.
These are the very subtle time stealers that unless you’re paying attention, it’s easy to miss them. The ones that you use are great examples as well. It’s also that, “I’m researching this. I better check this out.” There is no one that’s reading this that has not gone down the rabbit hole on something at some point in time. We all know we’ve done it. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We’ve all done it, but it can become a workplace habit and that’s when it becomes a problem.
Meeting Mania: The Time Thief Who Steals Everyone’s Productivity
We’ve all watched a YouTube video to teach us how to do things and then the next video comes up, you’re like, “Maybe that’ll teach me how to do this,” and then you just lose track of time. Which is why I always have a thing. When I delegate tasks, it’s like if you hit a roadblock at any point in time. Set a clock, give yourself twenty minutes to figure it out. If you can’t figure it out, either file a support ticket and then come to me and let me know or come to me and let me know and we’ll see what we need to do.
I understand not all applications have free support and all of that stuff. When you delegate tasks, you’ve got to tell people when they get stuck how long you think they should spend trying to solve the problem themselves because some people will never try to solve the problem themselves. We’ll talk about that time stealer in a second and then you’ve got the people who will spend a week trying to solve the problem themselves because to them, it’s some personal failing if they ask for help or admit that they can’t figure it out.
Taking us to the third type of time stealer. This is the person who I’m going to say they steal everybody’s time. This is the person who wants to have meetings about meetings. They want to check in at every step of a project or a task. They want confirmation and validation that they are right for even minor decisions. They create committees for things that can be handled by one individual. They insist on consensus. They will sit back and wait for you to tell them to move forward even though they didn’t directly tell you that they were asking, that they are waiting for you to tell them to move forward. They just think you’re going to figure that out.
They want a 30-minute meeting to discuss two-minute tasks. These are the people who also would rather have a meeting with you to tell you about the bottleneck than go and try to figure it out for twenty minutes. What have you seen of this type of, we’ll call this the archetype of a time waster, time stealer?
In this case, the good news is it usually doesn’t take too long to catch this except often the problem is, everyone thinks it’s only happening to them. There’s not enough sharing to say, “Tonya’s always coming and asking me questions.” If there’s fifteen people that all say, “Tonya’s always coming and asking me questions,” that’s a bigger problem. Everyone thinks, “Tonya only comes to me and asks me questions.” They don’t realize that Tonya’s going around asking everybody questions all the time. That’s usually when you can’t find it when we aren’t talking about that and that whole inability to make a decision
The problem is, everyone thinks it's only happening to them. And so, no one shares. Share on XFor me, this is one of those places where an effective accountability process solves a whole lot of this. You can find it fairly quickly. In fact, one of our clients has started implementing our accountability process. One of her direct reports will tend to meander, and as an extravert, I understand the meandering conversation. I will own the meandering conversation. Sometimes my conversations meander.
I get how that happens, particularly if you’re an extrovert, but because of the process where it wasn’t all having to be communicated verbally. Some of it was done via a document beforehand. She was able to keep this thing under control. She got herself and her person back an hour from what their meetings normally are. She said, “Our meetings are normally scheduled for 60 minutes. They usually run at least 90.” There we go. That’s the first thing. She said, “My first meeting after this because I was able to start managing this. It only took us 40 minutes.”
That caught almost both of them back almost an hour. That’s two hours in a week. That would be like 100 hours in a year. That’s a week’s time for both of them. Sometimes it’s about helping them manage it but then there’s some folks that don’t want to be and that becomes a problem. The trick with that is being aware that if it’s happening to you, it’s probably happening to somebody else in the organization.
It’s so important.
That’s the thing. When you think, this employee is only coming to you and doing this to you. That’s probably not true, even though you’re the owner. Someone’s like, “They’re doing it to me because I’m the one that has the answers.” I bet that’s not true. I bet they’re not having these long conversations asking about lots of things all the time to just you. It’s probably everybody.
That feeds in well to the next, the last type or pattern that I’ve seen. This is like a perpetual starter. They are great at starting projects. They’ll start a bunch of things at once, but they never get anything to the finish line. Oftentimes, what happens is, a project will land in their lap, and they’re super excited. They get it started, but then they get distracted by something else. These are the people that oftentimes will run around putting out fires but they never get the fire completely out because they’re moving on to the next one and the next one.
You end up with a lot of say projects that are at like the 90%. I would use a football term but I don’t know how many yards are in football It doesn’t matter but almost to a touchdown but not quite to a touchdown. Other people have to pick it up and close it but because other people didn’t start it, it takes them more time to close the deal than it would take the person who started it. This is one in particular where I see accountability coming in at least with like in our organization, Gwen, because we don’t lose sight of all the project or fewer projects will fall through the cracks when you have an established system of accountability to check in on things.
The Perpetual Starter: Why Unfinished Projects Plague Your Business
The irony of this is often the person you’re talking about is the owner.
I’m going to let you say more about that for one minute.
The reason is because they are visionary and they like starting things. That’s part of being an entrepreneur. It’s all of those things and I totally get it but that typically is much more of an owner’s responsibility. It’s one of those places where we don’t understand that we’re creating a time-wasting environment because we’re causing problems for our people, whoever they are. In this case, it can be both contractors and employees to be running around and starting this thing and thinking it’s the thing. All of a sudden, they’re being told, “No, we’re doing this other thing.” That thing gets left.
This is an interesting one because it often feels like it’s a contractor employee, someone working for us. Often, it’s our issue as the visionary entrepreneur that’s creating this time-wasting environment because we’re not allowing our people to take things because we’re not focused enough. Now, this can also happen at the contractor employee level as well.
Honestly, in a lot of the clients that we see, I find it’s more of an actual leadership issue than it is an employee or contractor issue. They’re trying to keep up, but you keep shifting gears so fast they can’t and they’re not allowed using that a little bit loosely to ever get to take things to the finish. They also will create a level of frustration that then means they aren’t necessarily working as an official.
Gwen, we’ve spent a majority of the episode talking about what it looks like how people can steal time from you, from the organization, from payroll or from their colleagues. We’ve talked about why that’s a problem and how it shows up. What do we do about it?
Reclaiming Your Time: Practical Strategies To Combat Time Theft
One of the things that we have to do is be time conscious. One of the things is you need to look at invoices if they’re coming in from contractors or timesheets if they’re coming in from employees and say, “How much time are things going towards?” If you’re getting this very generic, “I spent ten hours this week, this month or whatever.” You have no idea specifically of that ten hours how it’s being broken down. You don’t have to necessarily have minute detail but having some idea, you’re at high risk. It does take time on your part as the CEO to be paying attention to that. It’s time well spent because a few hours, your biggest expense almost always for most businesses is your people’s expense.
Losing 10% of that could be a pretty giant number even for a relatively small business. Keeping track of that to me is the very first thing. You’ve got to take time to look. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. It’s not that you don’t trust them, it’s you trying to understand. If they get super defensive like, “Why are you checking?” That, to me, is a flag because if you’re not willing to be able to explain, that’s a problem. One of the things with contractors is, I want contractors to be able to give me detail week by week.
I want to be able to get that information along the way because I know because I’ve been on the other side of this as a freelancer. I have watched people. It was never me because that’s not my personality. I watch people who had to fill out time sheets once a month and they would sit down on the 30th or the 31st of the month and figure out how much time they spend on a particular client. There is no way they know. They’re making that up. They’re making a guess. You may be getting the benefit of that or you may be paying the cost of that.
Make sure that you’re getting timesheets and information in relatively short periods so that you can keep track of it. Occasionally, why it’s important to do, your very favorite thing, Tonya. You know what I’m going to say, a time study, where you’re paying attention to it. When I say time study, I say everyone doing a time study. You, as the owner, as well as everyone else. That’s the place where all of a sudden you can start seeing the leakage of time. Where it’s like, “I didn’t realize I was spending two and a half hours every day on my email.”
It doesn’t feel like that because it’s 10 minutes here or 20 minutes here and it’s 5 minutes here. All of a sudden, that’s like a big chunk of my day. You realize that in that case often it’s the context switching going from one thing to the other to the other. If you just said, “I’m going to do 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon.” You probably could still get all the emails done but you’d be saving yourself an hour and a half in this example.
Not that you need to do it all the time. I would not ever do it more than once a quarter. I probably would say once or twice a year is more than adequate. Unless you think you have a problem and if you do think you have a problem, start asking for the information and find out how long is it taking folks. The other thing that will happen is maybe it does take you only 30 minutes, but most everyone else, it takes an hour.
When you think it’s only taking 30 minutes, it’s because it takes you 30 minutes. Part of the reason it takes you 30 minutes is you’ve been doing it for twenty years and you know exactly how you want to do it and all of those things. No one’s ever going to be your brain. I remember this with one of my other clients where it shouldn’t take that long. I said, “you have all of the answers to all of the questions.” You get to make all of the decisions in whatever you decide is the right answer.
Someone else has to think about what would be best for the business, which is a different thought than, “It’s my business. I know what’s best for the business.” It takes longer. Being aware of what those timepieces are. If you’re seeing an issue, address it. Don’t assume it’s going to get better. I have never seen it get better ever. It only gets worse. If you’re seeing, “It’s going to be a hard conversation,” but you got to have it.
That is so true. What I would say also is I just want to have a little reframe because you’re very careful to call it a time study and not a task study. This is something I see people get wrong. Task study I find does make people get the Willys because just from perspective. The idea behind a task study is to see how long it takes you to complete a task and then people start thinking, “They’re going to scrutinize how long it takes me to do a thing.”
A time study is about where the time goes. It doesn’t so much matter how much time email takes you every single day so much as you’re looking at, how is the day cut up? Maybe what you don’t know is that emails every Monday are four hours simply because so much email comes in over the weekend. You’re thinking like, “Email is an hour a day,” because when you think about how much time you spend on email, you’re thinking Wednesdays and on Wednesdays, there’s not a lot that’s coming in. That’s where time studies are helpful.
If you just look at them as how the day is broken up day to day or week to week, versus carrying too much weight and how much time is spent on each individual thing because that’s where you start to see the impact of the task switching. Now, we have another episode coming up. We will be concluding the series with a conversation that’s not nearly as fun to have, honestly, because it’s about money theft. This truly does affect your bottom line. This truly could bankrupt. No if, ands, or buts.
We’re going to talk about not just the impact of it but also how to recover from it. Now, if you already are recognizing patterns from either this episode or elsewhere in the series. If you find that what your team is accomplishing just doesn’t quite match up with your expectations and maybe you have tried everything we are suggesting and you’re just still not able to figure it out or you figured it out but you’re not sure what to do next. You don’t have to keep doing this on your own.
We offer a clarity call. You can book a call directly with Gwen at EverydayEffectiveness.com/Clarity. You can talk through your situation. Gwen can give you some very specific insights. It’s not a sales call. It is just a higher level of customization. A little bit more than what we can provide here in the show. We would love to have that. All you have to do to book that directly is in EverydayEffectiveness.com/Clarity.
Mentioned in This Episode
Related Episodes
- Part 1 in the Series – Death By A Thousand Paper Cuts: When Good People Drain Your Business
- Part 2 in the Series – The Hidden Cost Of Energy Vampires In Your Business
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
