Time Marches On

DO you hear it? Listen carefully. It is very, very faint and easily drowned out by the louder random noises that clutter your life. There it is the subtle sound of sand running through the hourglass of
your life. It is the invisible, inevitable process of time ticking away never to be regained, never to be reused.
This morning, unless you are one of the unfortunate souls whose time was permanently cut short, you woke to 86 400 seconds of precious time to be spent in any way you see fit.
Here is a nasty experiment, subtract your age from 70. Now take that number, divide it by 0,7. The answer is the average percentage of your life you have left.
If you are on the other side of 35 the answer is a real shocker.
We do not really have a lot of time. So I get rather annoyed when someone tries to waste it.
I spent some time on the doingbusiness.org  website, part of the World Bank Group, after someone suggested I look at it.
If you google “doing business in Zimbabwe” the first search result is our national profile so I would say it is worth having a look.
The results were not very encouraging: 90 days to register a business from scratch, 106 days to get electricity to a new factory, 53 days on exports.
It was a painful read. Ninety days to register a business is only three months, but compared to South Africa’s 19, America’s six, and China’s just over 30, it looks like a living hell.
Did you know that there are 49 taxes and rates to be paid during a business year?
It is all there giving potential investors a snapshot of business in our nation and the burden of bureaucracy that snares us up.
The burden that wastes the little precious time that we all have.
Now you may question the accuracy of the results on the website all you like, but that is what the world sees and reads.
The real question is anyone doing anything about it?
As consumers are we demanding better services from our authorities or are we all blindly fetching the municipal inspector when we have already paid a fee that would cover his transport.
Inefficiency costs us. We can rant at the authorities all we like for the lengthy processes they put us through, but we then proceed to put our clients through the same pain.
Why should we wait for more than 20 minutes at the doctor’s office for a scheduled appointment?
If the meeting is from eight to 10, why does it start at 8.30? We have a culture that tolerates tardiness and excuses late delivery.
How much quicker would you get things done if I deducted 10 percent from your fee for every day you failed to deliver on time?
You cannot manage time. You know this. You cannot speed it up, you cannot slow it down.
You cannot command the sun to set earlier or later, or the seasons to halt their progress from one to the other.
You cannot manage time, but you can manage yourself.
Time management is self-governance.
Plan
Use “spare” time to plan your day. Spare time includes that increasingly long drive to work.
Reschedule your daily programme if it makes you more effective. If getting to work takes you an hour, try leaving earlier to beat the traffic.

Explore different routes to home and work
I take a different route home in the evening to my morning trip simply because it is so much quicker.
Under promise and over deliver. Leave a little margin for error on the end of every shipment, but personally ship within the time-frame.
Do not use your margin as an excuse but use it as a way of showing great service when your product arrives “early”.
Show up early for meetings
Include travel time when planning meetings. Do not set a meeting for 10am when you know that you have one earlier that only ends at that time.
It is so easy to overlook this when staring at your diary that works in one hour long blocks.
Leave a margin for travel if you are not hosting consecutive meetings at the same location (anyone doing business in Johannesburg knows this).
If someone is 15 minutes late for an hour long meeting then they only get 45 minutes of your time.
If you are 15 minutes late and have not had the decency to call or reschedule give them the whole hour, but make sure you call before your next meeting to reschedule.
Listen carefully. Do you hear that? The sand of time is still flowing away in the hourglass, you had better do something with it.