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Question Every Minute You Spend

by Glenn Shepard

August 3, 2010

 

 

“If you don't develop your people, bad things happen.”

 

Ken Blanchard

Coauthor of The One Minute Manager®
 

Ask Glenn column

 

Dear Glenn,   

I'm a Gold Inner Circle member and listened to your weekly podcast with my management team today.  We discussed your principle of "letting go of the wheel" by trusting your employees to choose the paint colors for your office.

     But could you give us an example of one where decisions with more substantial consequences were involved?

Darcy in Salt Lake City, Utah

 

Dear Darcy,

You bet. They also chose the new PBX phone system and two printing presses to replace two of the six lost in the flood, without me ever seeing what I was buying.

     The phone system was pretty straight forward, but the printing presses were trickier.

    I was in Missouri the day the decision needed to be made, so I asked these questions:

 

1. Were these the level of machines we needed? ( I didn't want  to under buy or overbuy)

 

2. What are the operating costs and reliability record on this model?

 

3. Is the vendor quoting us a fair price?

 

4. Is this vendor trustworthy and reliable enough to service the machines?

 

Based on their answers, I spent more than the price of a car, sight unseen.

        Thanks for your question.

 Glenn in Nashville, TN

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Glenn's Personal  Blog

Click on the gold pen to see what Glenn's on a rant about now

In 1988, I purchased a small spin-off of the Nashville based company Datamarketing Network.

 

The attorney who brokered the deal gave me the best business advice I ever received – "Question every dime you spend".

 

I’ve learned that a business can't cut corners on certain areas – such as employee training or quality equipment – and still thrive. But when my employees ask to buy a new copy machine or anything else, I always question what kind of return I’ll get on my investment.

 

The one piece of advice I never received, but wish I had, was “Question every minute you spend”.

 

You can always make more money, but you can never make more time.

 

Time is an EXTREMELY harsh and unforgiving master. This is why we hear terms like “the ravages of time”.

 

Ravage is defined in the dictionary as “To bring heavy destruction or devastate”.

 

This word is so strong that if you Google “Ravages of”, the top three results are:

 

1. Ravages of Time

2. Ravages of War

3. Ravages of AIDS

 

But isn’t it a little dramatic to compare time to life-and-death issues like war and AIDS?

 

Not at all.

 

As grim as it sounds, time is just as related to death as war and AIDS are. All of us have only a certain amount of time to live, and every day we live brings us one day closer to death.

 

In fact, the two minutes you just spent reading this brought you two minutes closer to the end of your life.

 

So was it worth the two minutes you spent?

 

The answer is a resounding “YES” if you will begin to question every minute you spend.

 

 

To Your Success,

Glenn Shepard

 

 

 

 

This article is copyrighted material and may not be reproduced without permission. It is excerpted from Glenn’s new program “Time Management Skills for Busy Professionals: New Edition for 2010”, scheduled for release in August 2010. If you’d like to be on the VIP list to preview this program at no charge, watch for an announcement in your inbox.

 

 

 

 

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