Soundbites
The hours we squander Ever wonder how much time you waste on telephone trees? (Or are you too hip to use a telephone?) “Your call is important to us....” (But not important enough to answer in person.) “Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed recently....” (How is it possible that so many companies have had to change their menu options? Or do they just buy these comments from Excuses ‘R Us?) The trees can be taller in Canada, where many offices greet you in both English and French, then add, “For service in English, press One....” By then 20 seconds are gone, plus those wasted on reciting office hours, telling you how important you are and letting you know that the call “may be monitored for training purposes.” A treed company may protest — “it’s only a minute.” Uh-huh.
Multiply that by thousands of callers and it adds up. You can feel the sand falling, grain by grain, in the hourglass of life. In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson relates an incident from the early days of the Macin-
tosh computer. Jobs, known as a despotic fussbudget, complained that the Macintosh operating system took too long to boot up. “If it could save a person’s life,” he asked one of the engineers, “would you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” The engineer conceded that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and sketched some figures. If five million people used the Mac, and it took 10 seconds less to turn it on every day, it would add up to three hundred million hours per year that people would save, which Jobs calculated was equal to a hundred lifetimes saved every year. The engineer was impressed — and motivated. Within a few weeks he managed to trim not 10 seconds but 28 seconds off the boot-up time. It is amazing how much less time we’d waste if we put our minds to it. Brian Tracy, professional development trainer, has written, “One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.”
Cool phone I sometimes wonder what our world would be like if Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone years after someone else had come up with e-mailing, texting, tweeting et al. “What, you mean I can actually talk to someone directly instead of punching out all my little mis-spelled messages on this stubby little keyboard? How cool is that?” — Dan Turner in The Globe & Mail
Zap the trash God has chosen to order the world in such a way that our food isn’t just miraculously zapped into our refrigerators each day. Clothes do not grow on trees, nor do our houses assemble themselves. The trash The Marketplace November December 2014
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