time Archives - Dennis E. Gilbert

05
Jul 21
-

Time Value, Are You Getting The Benefit?

Time value might be a measurement you’re familiar with even if you don’t recognize it at first. It seems most people believe that good things take time, but how is that value measured?

When you first learned how to tie your shoes it may have taken some time, and some additional practice. Now you can tie your shoe in one or two seconds.

You might paint a picture with some water colors. It might have taken you an hour or more. The picture can be scanned or duplicated with a copier in less than one minute. It’s not an original, but it still has great value.

The same is true for nearly anything you do. At first, things take more time. After you get some practice it all seems easier and faster. The quality doesn’t have to be sacrificed and the time for delivery improves.

What is the real value of time?

Time Value

In the workplace, teams often seek solutions for problems. The easy problems, or the ones that have occurred before are more easily solved. The time to fix is minimal. That means more value for your investment of time.

Complex problems are a little different. They are often complex because there is a bigger learning curve. There is some time required to discover the root cause, strategize on ways to approach it, and ultimately some trial and error until the solution is fully realized.

It is a constant battle against the undiscovered or the unresolved. The value of your time and the associated performance improves when you put in the effort.

Cheap and easy takes less time. The value of cheap and easy is less.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

22
Jun 21
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Worth It? Is It a Question About Time or Value?

Tags : risk time value worth

When there is disappointment or a decision to be made, someone might ask, “Is it worth it?” It seems commonplace yet it may not be asked as often as it should.

Was it worth it when:

You did your best work?
You cut quality to improve in speed?
Someone suggested you deviate from your current path to try something new or different?

Time is a constant for everyone, yet, it is a finite resource. It is one that everyone has the same amount of so the only way to benefit is through productivity and efficiency.

When you spend your time putting in the extra effort, does it make a difference? Time for studying, education, or family, have you balanced it appropriately. When you aren’t sure, you may ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”

Worth It

Life is full of choices and decisions. Life is also full of risk.

There is always risk. Sometimes it is viewed in trade-offs, or viewed to benefit the one, instead of the many.

Workplace risk is often measured as personal risk. A risk to speak up, or stay silent. Silence may allow the team to go off course, on the other hand, disagreeing with the boss might get you fired.

Assessing risk often reaches a conclusion based on a question of worth.

At the pawn shop or flea market, a used item is assessed by worth. The question develops and worth is measured.

Perhaps it should be questioned more. Questioned for compensation, questioned for the customer, and questioned for the activity that you’ll perform next.

Is time part of the equation?

Time and Value

Time is nearly always relevant. It pushes people to weigh risk, prioritize, and assess value.

The next time you’re curious about worth, consider how the boundaries of time change value.

More time often makes things have more worth.

Time is always associated with the price you pay.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

24
May 21
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Time Data Anchor, Has It Impacted You?

Tags : career quality skills time time management

Have you come to realize the time data anchor? Time has value and your expectations for its use might be impacting everything you do.

How much time do you spend doing laundry, cutting the lawn, or shopping for groceries?

What about professional growth, studying a topical area, or how many years until you retire?

When you take your car for repair, there is an estimate on time. Sign up for the workshop and you’ll know a start time and end time.

In the workplace, there may be a time parameter for processing an order, talking with a customer, or a staff meeting.

In life and in business we cling to data anchors. That data or parameter sets the stage for how much, how long, or how often.

The expectation of time can be both a blessing and a curse. While it may provide some meaningful measurement is it limiting expectations or setting too lofty of a goal?

Time Data Anchor

Time is often measured with averages. The average time it takes for the car repair, your average wait for customer representative, or the average length of time to attain an advanced certificate or degree.

When the average becomes the anchor, everyone has a similar expectation and a similar result.

Why should the meeting last an hour? Would 47 minutes be better, or should it be 16? If you decided to meet for two and a half hours, do you get a more impactful result?

In some cases, the measurement of quality is calculated by the investment in time. If you whip up a chocolate cake in thirty minutes, is it as delightful as one that was created in two hours?

It is similar for craftsman, artists, and book authors. In some cases longer is perceived as better.

The opposite side of course is shorter. The drive-through restaurant, the boot-up of your computer, or the load time of the website.

How you spend your time may have a significant impact on your professional skills, your career goals, and what you will accomplish in the next decade.

When you spend more time on something that provides value with more use, it creates a better end result. You’ll have something better than average. Consider your job skills, the artist’s painting, and perhaps your fitness program.

The time spent in the drive-through line likely isn’t going to improve your meal, your earning potential, or your waistline.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

11
May 21
-

Time Efficiency Starts With More Patience

Tags : culture efficiency productivity psychology of work time

Time and efficiency are not the same thing. Time efficiency probably sounds a lot more like productivity. Is faster better, less risky, and more meaningful? Unlikely.

It is always a race against a clock.

We needed this yesterday.

It’s overdue.

Must be done now.

It’s true, time does cost. Yet, so does a lack of clarity, errors made in haste, and inferior quality.

Vloggers sometimes speed up their final product, a time-lapse of sorts, get through the slow spots faster. Someone might fast forward through the commercials of a recorded television show. Install a Chrome browser extension to speed up viewing of video content. Is it the same experience for everyone?

Of course, it isn’t.

Setting Pace

People have different life experiences, different listening and perception skills, and even a pace that feels just right.

Some people walk faster, others slower. Read faster, read slower. Enjoy the moment longer, or skip the moment altogether.

The result? Like most things in life there is a sweet spot in the middle. Outliers tend to exist on either end of the continuum.

Time management matters but it is more than just streamlining a schedule.

Finished first is important, but a nice-looking boat that won’t float has much less value.

For workplace leaders, sometimes you have to go slow, to go fast.

Time Efficiency

A team pushed too far will have more mistakes, more waste, and increased issues with quality. Worse, when the team learns more about the metric used for measurement and the pressure is high, integrity starts to slip.

A team member falling behind is often skipped rather than supported. It’s a harmful cultural scenario that applies more pressure to top performers as they make up for lagging contributors. Eventually, top performers burn out, feel abused and misused.

Individuals and organizations often need more time efficiency.

That often starts with more patience. Get everyone onboard. Run on all cylinders.

Don’t wait, get started.

The clock is ticking.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

23
Oct 20
-

Meeting Decisions May Be The Hold-Up

Tags : balance choices decisions meeting management time

Is your workplace culture caught up in meeting decisions? Decisions that are always contingent on holding a meeting?

Meetings often feel necessary and certainly, many of them probably are. Meeting effectiveness matters because too many details, a lack of fact-finding, or the wrong people at the meeting can derail even the best intentions.

Most of the best work that you do comes when you find the right balance. The balance between too much and too little, too authoritarian or too relaxed, and even too fast or too slow.

Size Matters

In the smallest of businesses, the owner makes the decisions. There is a time to contemplate and study, and also a time to act. The owner can, at his or her descrestion, act fast.

Big companies have different hurdles. The decision-making process is often slower, seemingly more calculated, and often tied up with too many people having a hand in the pot.

Decision quality is often a concern. One side believes the decision was made too soon and without enough information. The other side believes there was analysis paralysis and too many details.

Who really suffers?

Meeting Decisions

Ultimately, it is likely the customer who suffers the most.

They have to deal with delays, less quality, and often rising prices.

Who has the bigger advantage? The big company or the small company?

While the big company has more market share and thus exposure and reputation, the smaller company is nimbler and more flexible. Decisions mean outcomes and outcomes mean action.

Your next decision and the time it wastes or maximizes may not only be holding you up, but it may also be holding you back.

Are you surfing the status quo or are you blazing a trail for future success?

It’s probably a balancing act.

Ending the meeting or holding one will help you find the right balance.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and corporate trainer. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

21
Oct 20
-

Continuous Feed is Persistent and Attainable

Tags : career goals persistence time

Popular in the 1980s, continuous feed forms for computer printouts kept the information flowing. Your work and what you’ll achieve is a practice across time. It flows, one page linking to the next.

Do you realize what your cable and internet bill will cost you across the next five years?

Have you considered how many hours you’ll spend surfing eComm websites for things you’ll buy and the amount of money you’ll spend?

Have you calculated how many hours you’ll put into your craft by 2025 or 2030?

Some people consider that in every career there are dues to be paid. Across time the effort and hours stack up, costing more and more until finally a milestone is achieved.

Yet onlookers often have a different point of view. They believe that you just hang a shingle, start a podcast, or simply get lucky and success is achieved overnight.

Luck often plays a role, but how you manage luck and what happens next will have more to do with long-term outcomes than any single luck event.

Most success does come with a price. It is the price of continuous feed.

Continuous Feed

Moment-by-moment and day-by-day the persistent process of stacking one piece on top of another adds up. It is the single drop in a bucket repeated so many times you’ve lost count until eventually, you fill the pail.

What you want to attain is not so far away. You just have to feed it a little bit each day, repetitively, across time.

One other aspect of continuous feed, just like thousands of pages all connected with a perforated tear, unless you rip it apart, you’ll always be able to see where you came from.

Don’t lose track.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

14
Sep 20
-

Pressure Decisions Often Result in Costly Outcomes

Tags : cost decisions time under pressure

Do you make pressure decisions? Those that are hurried while being supported and cheered by peers? Will the outcome be good?

People often hesitate to make decisions. They’ve been burned before, slipped up, and didn’t think things through completely. Now, they hesitate.

There are at least two time factors connected to decisions. The assumed cost of making the decision too fast and the assumed cost of making the decision too slow.

Everyone making an important decision faces the analysis of the short run, the long run, and their own bias.

There are threats of poor information, peer pressure, and manipulation.

Are you making good decisions? What are the consequences?

Pressure Decisions

Stress and pressure seem to force decisions.

In the moment that you make an important and calculated decision, it is the right one. All of your information, analysis, and experiences draw you to decide.

After that moment, things can change. You can close on a mortgage and by the end of the week lose your job. When you made the choice, it was OK, suddenly, now, not so much.

It can be true about offering the price of a big contract to a client. True about seeing a medical professional if we just don’t feel quite right, or true about the best timing to buy a new car.

The pressure we face when making decisions has the consequence of the outcome. We also know the clock is ticking. Wait too long and bad things can happen, do it too quickly and bad things can happen.

Outside forces and gut feel often condition the decisions you make. Learning to control both can make a difference.

Yet, you’ll never escape the pressure of time. Too fast, too soon, or too slow and too late.

Sometimes you’ll get it just right.

Just right doesn’t last very long.

Learn to navigate time, not be pressured by it.

It costs less.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

17
Feb 20
-

Workplace Pace, Getting Things Right Before Fast

Tags : perfection quality time tolerances workplace pace

Are you moving at the appropriate workplace pace? Is time part of the metric you’ve grown to love, or love to hate?

Time matters to everyone. It especially matters for the work that you do.

The business needs the metric of time to calculate and anticipate revenue, production, and quality.

Are you doing things fast or are you doing them with the highest quality? Do you measure quality first or speed?

Many people will quickly express quality comes first, yet, in practice if you sacrifice speed for quality the measurement of performance is suggested to decline.

Which way is it?

Time vs Perfection

A pastry chef creates a masterful wedding cake. From the nearby table it looks absolutely perfect. On the back side there is an icing patch, a place where the icing spatula slipped. Hard to see unless the lighting is just right and you look very closely.

The carpenter does amazing work. The house looks perfectly square. If you look closer and measure corner to corner you notice it is off by an inch on one side.

An author grinds out a book. The work is published. Twenty-five thousand words. The perfectionist notices two typo’s and some questionable grammar.

All of these scenarios share something in common. The closer you look the more problems you find.

You may also suggest that given enough time all imperfections may be able to be removed or eliminated.

There is an intersection with quality and time.

Workplace Pace

Everything you do, and especially the things you do well may be up for critique.

There are times when everything needs to be perfect. There is also what we call tolerance. An acceptable balance between perfect and trash.

In your job, whatever you are building, creating, or especially replicating, it is a race against time.

Time matters and there is a deadline because the quest for perfection followed by replication seemingly never stops.

Think more about what you’re able to accomplish within the dimensions of tolerance and time.

That is the pace you’re racing against.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

13
Feb 20
-

Promised Time May Be a Communication Blunder

Tags : expectations promise promised time

Is someone seeking your time? Is it a client, a customer, or maybe a family member or even a friend? Have you promised time?

It often feels like time is working against us. We struggle to get it all done, done right, and done on time.

There a pressure associated with the commitment and worse, expectations from the person who feels as if they’ve been promised.

Expectations Set

We all know the situation. If we promise something in 30 minutes and we deliver in 25 minutes we’re a hero. If we fail, and deliver in 40, 50, or 60 minutes we may be regarded as a zero.

Often it is the little things that count. The small details that add up to an overall experience. It is true with the customer and it is true with family and friends.

Across time, those experiences become the expectation. They become your brand. What you deliver and when, become a perception for others.

Experience Guides Us

In the U.S. you may be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t know about the McDonald’s restaurant chain. For nearly everyone, you have and expectation of the menu. Perhaps a burger, french fries, and a drink.

Your perception of McDonald’s is based on your experiences.

Simple. Straight forward.

When it comes to time, are you holding up your commitment?

Promised time may be one of the hardest things for us to keep.

Promised Time

The people that you work with. The people who are present in your life. They have an expectation.

You often communicate expectations.

I’ll be back in a minute.

Let me finish this it will just take a minute.

Please give me until the end of the week, I’ll send it in an email.

If you are setting the expectation there is no one else to blame when you come up short.

Promised time is your brand. Make sure you keep your brand promise.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

04
Feb 20
-

Building Super Teams Creates More Magic

Tags : commitment effort magic super teams time

Is it all a matter of effort? Are you building super teams or only just going through the motions?

Will the time and commitment make a difference?

Creating Magic

Major events require a lot of effort. The Superbowl is a good example.

Planning across many months, perhaps even a year or more. People steering the arrangements, the motivation, and creating something that looks nearly perfect.

For many involved it is a one-shot deal. A once-in-a-lifetime, that special moment with millions of people watching.

The stakes are high, yet so are the chances for success. Not because it is easy but because the effort across time makes it look easy.

The investment yields a high return.

The same is often true for the well-manicured landscape, the wedding cake, or the handcrafted wooden boat.

It is all a culmination of effort, skill, and commitment put together across time.

It is definitely not for everyone. That is part of what makes it appear magical.

Building Super Teams

There are very few overnight successes, yet many appear as such.

Where and how you spend your time will produce an outcome.

When it comes to your workplace, your team, or the business that you own are you working smart and hard towards perfecting your craft?

Is what you produce a Mona Lisa or just a paint-by-number?

The effort and time you put in will have a significant impact on what comes out.

Is what you’re working towards today going to be worthy? Will it be super?

Magic often appears with great effort across time.

-DEG

Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP^TM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

Tag Archives: time

Jul 21

-

Time Value

Jun 21

-

Worth It

Time and Value

May 21

-

Time Data Anchor

May 21

-

Setting Pace

Time Efficiency

Oct 20

-

Size Matters

Meeting Decisions

Oct 20

-

Continuous Feed

Sep 20

-

Pressure Decisions

Feb 20

-

Time vs Perfection

Workplace Pace

Feb 20

-

Expectations Set

Experience Guides Us

Promised Time

Feb 20

-

Creating Magic

Building Super Teams

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