One of my friends sent me a bunch of articles from the UK this week. So with a bit of time on my hands on Saturday afternoon, I decided to go enjoy the weather and read them in the park. The pick of the bunch was a piece by the FT’s excellent Michael Skapinker.
The article was about how we use our time and the importance of stepping back to reflect. Skapinker used the 45 minutes saved on the Eurostar from London to Paris, looks like they finally got the high-speed track installed on the English side, to point to a broader problem of having to make every minute count.
As he points out, this is nothing new, particularly in business, but it is important as it’s often assumed that focusing on making every minute count is somehow better, but is that really the case? To a certain extent the answer has to be yes. Hopping back on the journey analogy, my flight to England would certainly be “worse” if it suddenly became longer, but can that be applied more broadly?
I started to think about this and the very fact I was reading an article from a December issue of the FT that was cut out and sent 5,500 miles in the post. Now I don’t often receive articles in the post or anything else worth having for that matter (bills and mountains of junk mail make up 99 percent of all my post), as most of my friends send links via email, with two or three clicks of the mouse beating the good old letter on speed and efficiency every day of the week. But would I have stored up links to take them on my computer to the park? Doubtful, in fact it’s about as likely as Bush being able to point out the countries he’s visiting in Africa on a map.
Making every minute count is really all about perspective then. Yes, in certain cases time is of the essence, but focusing on doing something every minute of every day rather than stepping back, taking time out and reflecting on the bigger picture is often the equivalent of donning a pair of blinkers.
