What Are We Spending Our Time Doing?

Many businesses know where their money goes. Fewer know where their time goes. On the surface, the answer seems obvious. People are doing their jobs. But when you start looking more closely, some interesting things appear.

How much time is spent searching for information?

How much time is spent fixing mistakes?

How much time is spent following up on unanswered emails?

How much time is spent waiting for approvals?

How much time is spent explaining the same thing over and over?

Most organizations don't track those things. Not because they don't matter, but because they slowly become normal. People adapt. Workarounds appear. Sticky notes multiply. Spreadsheets get created. People figure out how to keep things moving.

The workaround becomes part of the process even though nobody planned it that way.

I love workarounds because they tell a story. They tell me that somebody encountered friction and found a way around it. The workaround isn't the problem. The workaround is the clue. If several people have developed different ways to solve the same problem, that's usually worth paying attention to.

You might discover that the organization is spending far more time managing the process than doing the work the process was created to support.

And once you can see that, you can start doing something about it.

Healthy Flow. Healthy Business.