BURNING TIME

“Time is my most valuable asset” people say over and over but if you are in business and doing nothing to improve the communications of your people across the board then you can’t say that.

If I grabbed your wallet and started chucking your money into the fire, in seconds, you would yank it out of my hand, punch me in the nose and walk away. BUT if I want to waste your time with a lousy presentation or speech, you would hand it to me on a silver platter.

Think about it. How many times have you willingly allowed that to happen? Why didn’t you just walk out?

A friend of mine had to give up a day of work to attend a required day long workshop two hours away. The presenter, who was paid and should have been a pro, proceeded to pull up a powerpoint, stand there and read it. At the break she went to the organizer and said “I know how to read. Send me the PDF” and she left.

Afterwards, you walk away knowing that’s an hour of your life wasted that you can’t get back yet nothing gets done to fix it. Then you inadverently turn right around and waste the time of others with your lousy presentation or speech. Oh, I know, yours is better than theirs. Look up the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The typical approach to resolve this is to “have a two pizza meeting” meaning let’s have only enough people there two pizza’s can feed; “have a standing room only meeting” the idea of which is what exactly? To deliberately make them hate your meeting?; “I know, let’s invite ONLY who NEEDS to be there”, well DUH, shouldn’t that be the first requirement? So now you have a room full of standing people, eating pizza, who are still pissed off because the person giving the presentation hasn’t been trained to do a better job and GET TO THE DAMN POINT!

It’s like being on the deck of the Titanic with a bucket instead of going downstairs and patching the hole. Training them, ALL of them not just managers and C-suite, is the fix.

On your deathbed you won’t be asking for one more dollar so you KNOW time is your most valuable asset. Start treating it that way.