Where did the time go?

Digitization is Automation - Klaus Schwab (Founder of the World Economic Forum) in The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

What does Digitization mean, is it just about automating business processes? Is it about reducing costs and increasing income through fewer employees? Or is it about redefining the concept of all the time and what companies spend their time on without needing to radically update their knowledge?

The digital revolution has increased dramatically at the pace of our society's development. It's called the third industrial revolution, but now it's starting to creep up on the idea that we're already on our way into the fourth industrial revolution. Society and how we look at our humanity and what it means to be human are being redefined via extremely fast-changing ways of interacting with each other no matter where in the world we are.

So what do we entrepreneurs spend our time on in our daily work? Is it to develop our company, to develop new products, to listen to customers, to know where the market is for us?

Or do we spend a considerable amount of time on bureaucratic processes, trying to understand and learn new knowledge because our world is now enormously interconnected on so many different digital levels that we barely know where to start?

I am a person who loves and thrives enormously when I am exposed to situations where I feel uncomfortable, where I am painfully aware of my ignorance and at the same time, know that I have to learn very quickly about what I do not know anything about. What does this mean in terms of time?

As a new entrepreneur, my brother and I needed to quickly learn about processes from creating a business to tax issues, accounting, financial issues that we had not thought about before. We will develop our products, look at the market, find solutions to problems we want to solve for society and customers in general. At the same time, we have to reach out to markets, to individuals, how do we do that? Old-fashioned marketing no longer works in the same way. We are both incredibly involved in IT and the social media world because that's what we grew up with, but we are not video content creators either, we are not copywriters, we are not marketers. We needed help understanding that little extra that we simply did not have time to learn.

Let's say we develop and sell physical products, which we do not do (after all, we are software developers), or services (which we in a way do). We need an internal list of the products we create and sell. Here comes the dilemma, that information is no longer enough to have only in an excel sheet and periodically update it or send parts of the information to an advertiser company that puts up our products in a nice way in nice ads in newspapers. As small business owners, we end up spending a lot of time duplicating the same type of data over and over again in so many different places and edges and increasingly updating this data at an ever-faster pace. At the same time, we must understand social media and use it in a sensible way to convey our message, to make ourselves heard, but hey, do not forget, we are NOT allowed to sell! Because it is taboo nowadays!

The "Fourth Industrial Revolution", written by Klaus Schwab, says it so well already in the preface and first chapter:

The human race is at a stage where we are developing new technologies and ways to use them at an awful pace that we simply do not follow on an individual level what it is changing around us.

We simply have to stop and open our eyes and realize that we cannot think in the old ways either on a private level or in the business world. We as individuals interact with each other in society in a COMPLETELY different way compared to just 10 years ago, especially compared to before the smartphone came out.