Saving Time and Money
The Future is not going to be focused on saving money.
The future is going to be focused on saving time.
There are a few reasons why.
One reason is that time is way more valuable than money.
Money, you can get it back. Time, you can’t get it back.
The other reason why is because people watch their money closely.
If you think about a company, they have entire departments of companies or entire positions that just watch our money. They just watch our expenses.
We have accountants. We have CFOs. We have comptrollers; we have book bookkeepers. We have controllers. We have software that measures how we spend our money.
But how many of you have ever heard of a company that has a position, a person who tracks how people spend their time and is constantly auditing, recording, and logging where we are spending time?
Nobody.
I’ve never heard of a company that has this position, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes true.
Why?
Because we have spent so much time pinching pennies on how we get our stapler cheaper, etc.
How do we get our printer paper cheaper? How do we get our office rent down?
There’s so much attention that’s gone into reducing financial expenses, which is a good thing.
Meanwhile, while that’s happening, we’re completely ignoring this monstrous gigantic, gaping, cavernous mall–this pit of wasted time.
What is the number one expense on most companies’ P and L’s?
It’s labor.
Labor is the number one most expensive item.
We must pay people to do stuff.
But if somebody is wasting time, that is costing you, not just figuratively, but literally, way more than if somebody bought pens from Office Max instead of Office Depot.
Yet we would freak out about ordering from a catering company as that is too expensive and we don’t have that kind of budget.
However, years would go by before we ever even analyzed, even thought to look at or ask how people are spending their time.
Benefits of Saving Time
What are they doing repeatedly that’s eating up their time? What are all the things that we’re doing that we don’t even need to do anymore? How many reports are being created that nobody looks at? How many meetings are happening that people even need to attend?
It’s massive.
And it’s invisible.
It’s invisible because that’s not a line item in our P and L.
In the Take the Stairs book, one of the things that we shared was a data point that we found which said the average American self admits to wasting 2.09 hours each day at work.
Well, two hours is a fourth of the time.
If you work eight hours a day, or if one of your employees works eight hours a day, and they’re wasting two hours, that means 25% of their total time is wasted.
That’s what they admit to.
At the time of that data point, we went to the US Department of Labor statistics, and we found that nationwide, on average, a salaried employee makes about $40,000 a year.
That’s a lot of money.
And here’s the thing, it’s increased in recent years to probably the average salary of 45,000 a year or maybe more. We haven’t checked this though.
If you just look at the numbers here and recognize that if we’re wasting 2.09 hours each day, and the average salary employee makes $40,000 a year ($19.13 an hour) then that means that it costs employers $10,396 per year per employee.
When we say procrastination is the most expensive invisible cost in business, that’s what we mean.
We mean it literally in dollars and cents. We don’t pay attention to it.
We don’t pay attention to how we waste time.
We get frustrated personally with things that suck up our time, but we have almost no tracking mechanisms in place to go.
What about you? Do you have tracking in place to save time? I would love to know in the comments below.
