Timeless Time

Time. Do you have time to read this ? How was there time to write it ? Time is a basic human concept with a strong footprint in business. Correction: time is the second most important asset in any business, hence, time is to be looked for and preserved with great care.

Time is the second most important asset in any business; People is the first.

One could wander about time concepts, from the Theory of Relativity, to time travel and to the weird concept associated with quantum physics, but we will devote our time to the business time, hélas so many times wasted, being that waste typically discarded as a mere fact of life.

Time is a rare commodity. The day has 24 hours and within those hours we have to rest our body and our mind, we have to happily support the family, we should maintain a healthy social life and, of course, we must do our very best at our job, whatever this job may be. Be proud of what we do, and how we do it, is one of the most rewarding achievements in life.

A balanced life for the individual makes him happier and that happiness will strongly reflect on the job productivity: (read more)

"raising sales by 37%, productivity by 31%, and accuracy on tasks by 19%, as well as a myriad of health and quality of life improvements" [Forbes]

Naturally one needs discipline and reason to deal with time. This may be the difficult bit. All of us have a life behind us and within this life we carry a lot of prejudices and unconscious bad habits; we do not notice them because they have always been there. There is many documentation on the subject, from practical books for creative people (and shouldn't we all be creative at our jobs?) to more formal books on time management.

Priorities

Each one of us is unique. Unique on a specific issue. Doing something better than anyone else in the world. For some reason some of us do not mind going down the slope of self-pity, low self-esteem or something similar. However, always remember that these negative states are very rewarding for others.

While there are people crying others will be selling paper tissues

So, spending a bit of time finding out who one is, what one wants to do and how one can get better at what one does is "the" priority of one's time and this time investment will bring a huge profit, also in time, down the line of our lives.

Mainly in large organizations is quite common to see someone who has a specific job to spend time executing tasks who should fall under other people competencies, just because either they like to do that or because they do not like the work performed by those who should do it in the first place. In all perspectives this is a loose-loose-loose situation.

1. The person executing the task is not performing the job he/she is good at: we loose productivity
2. The task this person is executing will not excel, because it lies outside the person's competencies: we loose excellency
3. The person that should be doing the job will not learn in order to improve: we loose competency

At the end of the day is a huge waste of time mainly the future time, since if matters were cleared today, that would be a time investment for the future. We must keep our priorities and help others to keeps theirs, in order to allow for collective success. As John Nash put it (know more about Nash equilibrium)

The Best for the Group comes when everyone in the group does what's best for himself AND the group.

This is particularly relevant when we have, at a large organisation, different departments only thinking on the shortcomings for each department and not prioritizing the interests of the whole. A good example was public in 1999 when NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation.

In business the #1 priority is, as it should, the corporate North Star, whatever this star may be. To keep good metrics concerning this North Star good people is of the essence, but that is not enough if their time is not utterly used in the most effective way.

Focus

In order to excel in whatever activity we are doing, we need to focus on it. I know I am not going to get a Pulitzer prize with such a statement?, but the point is that some people do believe that to have focus on something means shutting down attention to everything else. I do not think so.

A surgeon while performing a very complex action must still pay attention to contextual details and make decisions upon them, a sailor while at the helm fighting a nasty piece of weather still has to pay attention to instrument's information and act upon them. How about a common business example? Emails.

There is a current of thought stating that emails are distracting and one should only check for emails at certain times of the day. The fact that they are distracting, or not, is not related to the emails themselves, but with one's own discipline....and focus. Received emails my be a very powerful source of added information for whatever task we are furiously working on.

Have you seen Cast Away movie with Tom Hanks? It is a fascinating movie and one of the more powerful messages is

We never know what the next tide will bring

meaning that what we need to solve a solution may be arriving faster than what we think. Although this is a mere detail in our busy daily lives, I have done work in companies, during my life, where people did not want to see emails while they were performing a task that demands a more focused attention. As I stated above emails can really be a distraction and a pain-in-the-neck; it is up to us not to let that happen....but emails, or any other carrier for that matter, can really be helpful .

• Emails have subject fields
• Subject fields are the first level of filtering to allow us to decide whether they are relevant for what we are doing now
• This is why it is very sound practice NOT to have blank subject fields, or
• Having subject fields filled in with irrelevant information, such as "Important case", or
• Having emails containing information that is not related to the one referred on the subject field.

Sooner or, even sooner, these bad practices will be responsible for a lot of wasted time, and as we know by know, time is a scarce commodity and will be sooner or, even sooner, scarcer. Of course that there are many ways to overcome these issues and one's creativity is the limit. Many years ago I was taught to use a simple method: to list on the subject field the topics from the general to the specific, such as:

Subject: ERP Project: Finance: Multi-Currency options

The recipient of the email, just by reading the subject knows exactly what the email concerns to and decides on the spot if it is worth reading now or can be left for later. If, for some reason, the contents of this email are related to the recipient's task at hand, great, it is extra relevant information. There is no point is executing a long and complex work to find out, hours later when we read the emails that one of them could have shortened our task and even contributed greatly to it.

Naturally that this time saving procedure does need some tuning on the technique of reading the emails, mainly for those who receive a lot of them.

1. One needs to check regularly to the last emails arrived, eventually by means of notifications. Usually the notifications allow to see the sender and the subject. That is all we need, for now.
2. Even if one does not check regularly the emails and, every now and then, decides to clear the inbox, Priority should apply, not the arrival order. Reading the subject and the sender will allow one to pinpoint those that look important and then one opens them and process accordingly.
3. It would help if emails are sent on a need-to-know basis, otherwise if they are sent to many people, just-in-case, mailboxes will get flooded and time consumed dealing with irrelevant emails will increase. Productivity declines.

Meetings

Boy, there is a reason for the cartoon we all know!

I can offer you a full document concerning meetings, but I would say the very basic rules, in order to save time, are:

1. Meetings are NOT meant to spread information. There are much more effective methods for that purpose.
2. The purpose of a meeting is to take decisions.
3. Attendees must go to meetings with the subjects previously prepared.

Knowledge is Power

Indeed it is! The tv show La Casa de Papel showed it in a very interesting way. Knowledge is power and knowledge comes from information processed and this information lies usually in documents. If we can't find quickly and precisely the documents we need, then we will be wasting a lot of time and, again, time is precious.

Whether it is an email, a power-point presentation or even a quick message sent over a social network we may need to find it quickly and have ways to know that the message got to its intended recipient. There are two typical situations which will bring potential waste of time:

1. Not finding a document, or a set of documents, satisfying a particular search criteria
2. Not being able to be sure that the recipient of a message did read it

Every organization must do whatever it takes to make sure that people use their time to be productive towards the organisation's North Star and not on avoidable time consuming profitless tasks.

Getting Time back

The solving of time related problems may be approached as in any other problem solving:

1. Understand the problem
2. Create a plan
3. Keep everyone motivated

The bottom line is: if we do not eliminate the time-wasting situations we loose money; if we loose money we cannot invest as much; if we cannot invest as much our market will decrease and this will quickly turn into a negative feedback system.

There are gazillions of daily situations that will make an organisation loose time. The greater the organisation the larger the accumulated time loss. Some of the reasons may be:

• People do not have the right competencies for the task
• People do not have enough training for the task
• Task planning is not effective

No Time for software development. Why?

There are extraordinary situations all around the world implying huge time loss where apparently the only reason if that the responsible people are turning a blind eye into the cause of the problem. Interesting enough software seems to be particularly damaged by this attitude. Let's go back a bit in time...let's go to the dawn of the automobile industry. Initially all the of the tasks for the assembly of a car were performed by humans, as Charlie Chaplin clearly explained. But, today, car assembly lines are based on robots because robots perform the tasks quicker and with no errors.

What is said concerning car assembly is valid for all other businesses...well, almost!

Can you spot it ? All industries evolved in order to save time... well not quite all. The software industry does seem to take pleasure in changing technologies but keeping the same attitude of spending huge time developing code for whatever is the new fancy technology. Why? Why is everybody turning a blind eye to this?

There have been situations turned public recently, revealing an absolute inconceivable waste of time and other resources. The market for some reason assumes that this need of spending the time of hundreds of developers to build a solution is a fact of life; the market does cry about this and, naturally, there are a number of vendors providing the paper tissues in the form of vast programming teams.

The market, for some reason, assumes that this need of spending the time of hundreds of developers to build a solution is a fact of life

It is expected that by 2020 there is the need for an extra 1 million computer program jobs and some say that it's time to consider alternatives to production goals. Clearly hordes of programmers will not eliminate the problem; they haven't achieved it so far. Neither low code will do the job. Low code has been an interesting solution, although its own commercial and technical limitations do not support real corporate-wide software solutions. Function Points are a productivity metric, which is fully supported by ISO 24570:2018, do show that although Low code have a better performance than manual software development, although Low Code simply cannot be compared with AI based Model Driven Development (MDD).

Countries and the necessity of saving time

Today, every business is a software business. Even the business of running a country

In a recent Delloite report Janne Viskari(director, Population Register Centre, Finland) stated "To achieve digital transformation, we need to make the overall process of developing services more open than it is now. Users need to be involved from the beginning and throughout the journey. The journey should outline what we want to achieve with users at each point of development. We need to embrace the overall idea of doing more agile development than we are used to.”

What better involvement could there be than having the users, themselves, creating code automatically from the business models they design since they are the experts on the matter? The gap between technology and users must be reduced to nil in order to have the needed solutions available in a very short time. What is important is what users see effective. Technology is a detail.

The small group of D9 Digital Nations includes following countries:

• Canada
• Estonia
• Israel
• Mexico
• New Zealand
• Portugal
• South Korea
• United Kingdom
• Uruguay

These are the countries that have gone a long way in terms of placing the citizen at the centre of their digital agenda as it is stated on the charter they have just signed. According to this charter

participants commit to working towards principles of digital development including the design of public services according to user needs, open markets, open and transparent government, a commitment to teach to children to code and to support all citizens to access digital services

Even at this progress level the signed charter states "teaching the children to code" instead of "teaching the children to design models, according to their needs, that will be used to create automated code" and, hence, letting them get acquainted with the concept of modeling when building of solutions, independently of technological details.

Countries like Colombia are pushing very hard in order for the Digital Transformation to ease the life if its citizens in a proof that this trend is not reserved for rich countries. Digital transformation, saving a huge amount of time, will allow everyone to spend their time on the really important tasks and decisions.

Wrap-up

Individuals, corporate employees, corporations as a whole and even countries at the highest level of abstraction need to save time. We do not have much of it. Saving time on the useless and irrelevant tasks, buy us time to think about and take decisions on what really matters. To decide where time is to be saved is up to each one of us.

May 2019 bring each of you good time to achieve everything you need

PS: due to the large amount of details this article may be revised and improved along time, so that readers get the best of their time.